Renewables

The composite industry struggles to attract and educate new talent and most engineers are unaware of the advantages of composite materials.

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Wind power is rapidly developing in practically every part of the world. Global capacity reached an impressive 316GW in 2013. Denmark alone intends to generate 50% of its electricity demand by 2050 with the United Kingdom, Germany and Denmark investing another £100 billion into the wind industry. By 2020, 354000 people will be employed in the European wind industry.

This course will enable you to design your own composite wind turbine blade, select the aerodynamic profile and calculate the wind loads on the blades. You will also gain an understanding of how to use composite materials to form the blade and learn about its structural architecture. Additionally, you will do the structural mathematics in Mathcad and Excel to ensure composite blade structural integrity resisting Dutch standard hurricane force winds and finish by generating your own 3D blade aerodynamic structure in MSC-Patran.

 The following content is covered in this course:

• Safety and design standards for wind turbines
• Components of a commercial wind turbine
• Basic 2D aerodynamics
• Structural Architecture of a composite blade
• Blade composite material selection, cost, strength, stiffness, weight, etc...
• Wind load forces on blades
• Structural design of a composite blade
• Generate the blade design in MS-Patran
• Blade tooling and blade manufacture process
• Simple test to validate your blade design