Three months ago, I had visited LM Wind Power Blades Factory located in Kolding, Denmark and had a chance to get detailed information about LM blade technologies and manufacturing process of blades. After then, we contacted with EAWind (http://eawind.com/) for the repair of damaged blades in our ongoing projects. I had a chance to witness blade repairing process and got some useful information from Mr. Adem Eldemir about the design and manufacturing process of WTG blades. Here below, you can read a brief information about blade manufacturing process.
Everthing starts with design. Designing of wind turbine blades is a very complex process including variables such as shape, structure, materials and processes. Design is basicly an optimisation problem of two variables which are performance and cost. Performance of blades are designated by the help of aerodynamic structure, fluid mechanics calculations and stress analysis.
Materials which are used while manufacturing blades can be stated as birch plywood sticks, core material and fultruded fiber rods.
LM Wind Power
After making two shells in a mould, manufacturing process starts with glass fibre layer. Birch plywood sticks and carbon rods are applied on sections where high strength is required on. If stiffness is required on the areas where high strength is not, balsa wood applied on these sections. The last layer which is applied is glass fibre layer. After appliying glass fibre, all the air is vacuumed and liquid epoxy is infused. This process is named as Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfer Moulding (VARTM). Blade sections are then cured and glued together.
Closing the Blade Sections
After gluing blade sections together, their edges and surfaces are polished and finally painted.
A.Yigit NEPHAN
21.08.2010
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