Blade Reliability & Composite Materials

Unplanned maintenance and component failures are a concern to both wind plant owners and wind turbine manufacturers. Sandia leads efforts in wind-turbine reliability research, specifically focusing on:

• Wind plant reliability & analysis
• Nondestructive inspection
• Composite materials research
• Optimized carbon fiber composites
• Structural health monitoring
• Effects of blade defects
• Leading edge erosion

Through this work, Sandia is ensuring that wind energy technology will deliver economical, reliable, clean energy to the nation.

Sandia works with industry partners to collect and analyze wind turbine reliability data in order to improve the predictability and reliability of wind power generation and operations. Researchers are analyzing proprietary data from industry partners to provide generalized characterizations of wind plant reliability issues and opportunities for improvement. When complete, these databases will allow industry to self-assess their turbines’ performance and make more informed operations decisions that improve power generation.

The Wind Blade Non-Destructive Inspection Center provides the following capabilities and expertise:

• Nondestructive Inspection (NDI)
• Automated & Robotic Inspection Deployment
• Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) and Sensor Development
• Composite Fabrication and Structural Repair
• Structural Mechanics & Damage Tolerance Analysis
• Fatigue, Fracture & Strength Mechanical Testing
• Reliability and Probabilistic Analysis

Sandia’s composites research capabilities include:

• Testing the effects of common flaws in composites on properties in fatigue loading
• Characterizing new materials such as urethane resins, aligned strand material forms, and carbon fiber composites
• Studying crack growth and delamination in adhesive and core materials
• Establishing full 3-D properties of thick laminates
• Developing substructure testing capabilities in order to capture the realistic and complex loading experienced by modern wind-turbine blades.
• Incorporating new test diagnostics such as Acoustic Emission Spectroscopy to improve understanding of in-situ material behavior

Download the latest database (v. 29.0)

Optimized Carbon Fiber Composites

Carbon fiber reinforced polymers (carbon fiber composites) offer significantly enhanced mechanical properties compared to the more widely used glass fiber reinforced polymers, enabling the design and manufacture of larger, high energy capture wind turbine rotors. However, commercial carbon fiber materials are much costlier than glass fiber, hindering their broader adoption in the wind industry. Carbon fiber composites were originally designed and applied to military and aerospace applications where strength is paramount and cost was not a primary factor. Thus, significant opportunities exist to reduce the overall cost of incorporating carbon fiber materials into a wind turbine blade where cost is a primary factor. These opportunities range from changing the raw material inputs, fiber conversion processes, and formats of the carbon fiber itself, through the composite material forms (e.g. pultrusion, prepreg) used in the blade manufacturing process.

The magnitude of the wind-specific value improvement of novel carbon fiber materials is determined through characterization of carbon fiber material properties by performing mechanical testing and accurate cost modeling. The performance of study carbon fiber materials is assessed through blade system optimization studies for representative wind turbine reference models.

Sandia and its partners have performed research on novel carbon fiber materials to assess the commercial viability to develop cost-competitive carbon fiber composites specifically suited for the unique loading experienced by wind turbine blades. This work enables the continued reduction in the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for wind turbines installed in the United States, including low wind resource and offshore sites, and has established routes for the broader adoption of carbon fiber materials in wind turbine blade design beyond existing commercial materials.