Investigation of the Mechanical Behavior of a New Generation Wind Turbine Blade Technology

Wind turbine blades are one of the largest parts of wind power systems. It is a handicap that these large parts of numerous wind turbines will become scrap in the near future. To prevent this handicap, newly produced blades should be recyclable. In this study, a turbine blade, known as the new generation of turbine blade, was manufactured with reinforced carbon beams and recycled, low-density polyethylene materials. The manufacturing addressed in this study reveals two novelties: (1) it produces a heterogeneous turbine blade; and (2) it produces a recyclable blade. In addition, this study also covers mechanical tests using a digital image correlation (DIC) system and modeling investigations of the new generation blade. For the mechanical tests, displacement and strain data of both new generation and conventional commercial blades were measured by the DIC method. Instead of dealing with the modeling difficulty of the new generation blade’s heterogeneity we modeled the blade structural system as a whole using the moment–curvature method as part of the finite element method. Then, the behavior of both the new generation and commercial blades at varying wind speeds and different angles of attack were compared. Consequently, the data reveal that the new generation blades performed sufficiently well compared with commercial blades regarding their stiffness.