A layup optimization approach of laminated composite wind turbine blade for improved power efficiency

Resumo

Wind turbine blades are usually made of composite materials. Their stiffness and behavior affect the
turbine performance, on the other hand, the material and layup orientation influence the blade stiffness. By taking
advantage of the bend-twist coupling that is a consequence of layup sequence, it is possible to produce a passive
control of the pitch angle which aims to improve the blade performance. The purpose of this work is finding the
best layup sequence of a wind turbine blade made of laminate composite materials using metamodeling based
optimization. For this, the finite element method is used to obtain the structural response of the wind turbine blade.
From this numerical simulation responses, a surrogate model based on Kriging approach is generated. Ply
orientations are adopted as input parameters, and the power coefficient of the wind turbine as output. Then, an
optimization process is carried out. The optimized layup sequence is compared with other layup configurations
and the surrogate model responses with the finite element model itself. Using this methodology is possible to reach
a significant improvement in turbine power coefficient. For instance, at wind speed of 20 m/s, the power coefficient
between layups achieves 8.2% of variation.