Fatigue Life Variability and Reliability Analysis of a Wind Turbine Blade

Author: Paul S. Veers, Herbert J. Sutherland, Thomas D. AshwillPublication: Sandia National Laboratories Wind turbines must withstand harsh environments that induce many stress cycles into their components. A numerical analysis package is used to illustrate the sobering variability in predicted fatigue life with relatively small changes in inputs. The variability of the input parameters is…

An Approach to the Fatigue Analysis of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine Blades

Author: Paul VeersPublication: Sandia National LaboratoriesYear Published: 1981 A cursory analysis of the stress history of wind turbine blades indicates that a single stress level at each wind speed does not adequately describe the blade stress history. A statistical description is required. Blade stress data collected from the DOE/ALCOA Low cost experimental turbines indicate that…

A General Method for Fatigue Analysis of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine Blades

Author: Paul VeersPublication: Sandia National LaboratoriesYear Published: 1983 The fatigue life of wind turbine blades that are exposed to the random loading environment of atmospheric winds is described with random data analysis procedures. The incident wind speed and the stresses caused by these winds are expressed in terms of probability density functions, while the fatigue…

The LIFE Computer Code Fatigue Life Prediction for Vertical Axis Wind Turbine Components

Author: Herbert J. Sutherland, Thomas D. Ashwill, Norman SlackPublication: Sandia National LaboratoriesYear Published: 1987 The LIFE computer code was originally written by Veers to analyze the fatigue life of a vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) blade. The basic assumptions built into this analysis tool are: the fatigue life of a blade component is independent of…

Predictions of peak fatigue stresses in a Darrieus rotor wind turbine under turbulent winds

Author: David MalcolmPublication: Wind Energy SymposiumYear Published: 1990 The field stress data from two locations on the blade of the Indal 500 kW Darrieus rotor have been processed into histograms of fatigue stresses and grouped according to the atmospheric turbulence intensity. The aim was to determine the magnitude of the maximum cyclic stresses on the…

Fatigue Case Study and Reliability Analyses for Wind Turbines

Author: Herbert J. Sutherland and Paul S. VeersPublication: Sandia National LaboratoriesYear Published: 1995 Modern wind turbines are fatigue critical machines used to produce electrical power. Economic viability requires them to have both low initial cost and long term reliability. The fatigue and reliability projects in Sandia’s Wind Energy Program are developing the analysis tools required…

Effects of Cyclic Stress Distribution Models on Fatigue Life Predictions

Author: Herbert J. Sutherland and Paul S. VeersPublication: Wind EnergyYear Published: 1995 The fatigue analysis of a wind turbine component typically uses representative samples of cyclic loads to determine lifetime loads. In this paper, several techniques currently in use are compared to one another based on fatigue life analyses. The generalized Weibull fitting technique is…

Validation and comparison of a newly developed aeroelastic design code for VAWT

Author: David Marten, Matthew Lennie, Georgios Pechlivanoglou, Christian Oliver Paschereit, Norbert Dy, Ion Paraschivoiu, Farooq SaeedPublication: Wind Energy SymposiumYear Published: 2017 The open source simulation code QBLADE, based on a Lifting Line Free Vortex Wake formulation to evaluate the unsteady aerodynamics, recently integrated the PROJECT-CHRONO FEA library that, by using Euler-Bernoulli beams in a corotational…

The Sandia Legacy VAWT Research Program

Author: Dale BergPublication: Sandia National LaboratoriesYear Published: 2016 This slide deck was present to Delft Technical University by Dale Berg who was a principal researcher of the Darrieus type VAWTs that Sandia National Laboratories worked on from the 1970s through the 1990s. It covers the history of Sandia’s work on VAWTs including their efforts to…

On the way to reliable aeroelastic load simulations on VAWT’s

Author: Torben Juul Larsen and Helge Aagaard MadsenPublication: European Wind Energy AssociationYear Published: 2013 In this paper a method for an implementation of a 2D actuator cylinder flow model of an Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) is presented. The model is implemented in a full aeroelastic code including consideration of structural dynamics, dynamic inflow, tower…