Investigation on Design for a 500 W Wind Turbine Composite Blade Considering Impact Damage.

Recently wind energy has been alternatively used as a renewable energy resource instead of the mostly used fossil fuels due to their increasing scarcity and environmental issues. This work is to propose a structural design and analysis procedure for development of a 500 W class small wind turbine system which will be applicable to domestic use at a relatively low speed region like Korea. Structural analysis including load case study and stress, deformation, buckling, vibration and fatigue estimation was performed. In addition, the blade should be safe from the impact damage due to FOD (foreign object damage) including bird strikes. MSC Dytran was used to analyze the bird strike phenomenon on the blade, and the applied method, Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian, was evaluated by comparison with the previous study results. Finally, the structural test was carried out and its test results were compared with the estimated results for evaluation of the designed structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]