Structural Optimization Design of 2MW Composite wind turbine blade

A procedure based on MATLAB is presented and utilized for the structural optimization design of Horizontal-Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) blades. Wind turbines matured towards a lowered cost-of-energy and have grown in rotor size therefore stretched the role of composite materials that offered the solution to more flexible, lighter and stronger blades. The structural aspects of a 82 meter long blade in an upwind, horizontal-axis wind turbine were developed in this paper. The promising generic blade structural designs were used to initialize a detailed structural optimization in which spar cap, panels and trailing edge reinforcements are sized such that the blades meet the intent of design standards. In this study, the optimization formulations include non-linear failure constraints. This present study has important significance for the structural design and optimization of wind turbine blades. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.