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Abstract: Wind turbines and green energy is of high interest nowadays and the size of the powerplants keeps getting bigger and bigger. The forces that arise as the blades increase in size have the magnitude to deform the profiles. This paper proposes a new design of a support system mean to strengthen the wind turbine blade and make it operable at higher wind speeds and withstand higher force concentrations.
Keywords: wind turbines, blade support, design, modelling, analysis.
1.INTRODUCTION
The first windmill to generate electricity in the rural USA was installed in 1890. Improved turbine design and plant utilization have contributed to a decline in wind energy generation costs from 35 cents/kWh in 1980 to less than 5 cents/kWh in 1997 [1].
Airfoils have been considered a controversial subject in the design of a aerodynamic wind turbine blades. The performance of the airfoils designed for airplanes are not always the best to be used in wind turbine design. Different problems may occur at the blade surface when using it in flows with low Reynolds numbers although they were designed to be used for planes travelling at heights that present high Reynolds numbers. [2]
Blade design dictates the performance of the wind turbine but with high performance comes a higher risk that the forces concentrated on the surface of the blade may bend the blades towards the tower and thus damage the wind turbine (figure 1).
A recent study on reinforcing the wind turbine blades has been done in Brasov [2] and has concluded that using different designs for reinforcing the structure of the blade through internal support beams will permit...