Investigating structural behavior of wind turbine composite blade using FSI method

The wind turbine blades are exposed under complex time-variant aero-dynamic loads, besides, due to the complexity of its aero-dynamic shape, the study on blade dynamic responses can be sophisticated. To achieve a more realistic simulation and with credible results, a FSI analysis is necessary for resolving the coupling effects between the blade structure and the surrounding flow, and thus examine the load impacts to the blade structure itself by having e.g. stress distribution and strain. A typical structural layout of a composite blade is shown in Fig 4(a). From the cut-plane view, the blade is composed by 6 sections on the chord-line direction, supported by 2 bearing structures between the up and down blade surfaces. For each section, materials with different mechanical properties and stacking orders are applied. This will lead to a sophisticated modeling process.