Tesis
Progressive Failure Analysis of a Composite Thin-Walled Beam Finite Element Model Under Aeroelastic Loading Conditions: Modeling and Simulation
Autor
Cárdenas Fuentes, Diego E.
Institución
Resumen
New advanced composite blades design methodologies can significantly impact the performance and reliability of wind turbine technologies. Current approaches employed in designing composite turbine blades, resort to sophisticated multiphysics codes taking into account fluid-structure interaction. When it comes to structural health monitoring and damage progression, the practitioner needs to evaluate the integrity of the composite structure by using in-situ real-time techniques, often neglecting the effect of the degradation of structure properties, particularly when addressing complex aeroelastic simulations. This work contributes to the state-of-the-art of damage progression in composite blade under dynamic operating conditions. Due to computational inefficiencies and the high demands of computational resources, dynamic aeroelastic simulations and performed using reduced order models. Wind turbine rotor blades are efficiently modeled using a thin-walled beam (TWB) approach, a ID FE model capable of capturing most essential characteristics of slender structures. The TWB was chosen because enables to recover the strains and stresses for all layers at any position of the blade, therefore enablesthe integration of failure models capable of predicting the propagation of damage in the structure. Due to its computational efficiency it is possible to integrate the TWB in a dynamic aeroelastic environment capable of describing the fluid-structure interaction occurring during operational conditions. The proposed architecture enables the evaluation of the blade structural integrity at every time-step. Failure criteria are checked at every time-step and when met, the mechanical properties of the damaged area are degraded and the stiffness matrix of the structure is updated. This approach fully couples the aerodynamics loads, structural and inertial loads, along with the effect of the damage caused by the applied loads. The ultimate goal is to provide the practitioner tools for the evaluation of blade integrity during operational condition, to assess their behavior during aeroelastic simulations and to provide insight into damage progression and reliability of composite turbine blades.