Reconstruction of Wind Turbine Blade Geometry and Internal Structure from Point Cloud Data

This paper presents a method for the digital reconstruction of the geometry of a wind turbine blade from a point-cloud model to polysurface model. The digital reconstruction of the blade geometry is needed to develop computer models that can be used by architects and engineers to design and analyze blade parts for reuse and recycling of decommissioned wind turbine blades. Initial studies of wind-blade geometry led to the creation of an airfoil database that stores the normalized coordinates of publicly-available airfoil profiles. A workflow was developed in which these airfoil profiles are best-fitted to targeted cross-sections of point-cloud representations of a blade. The method for best-fitting airfoil curves is optimized by minimizing the distance between points sampled on the curve and point-cloud cross section. To demonstrate the workflow, a digitally-created point-cloud model of a 100 m blade developed by Sandia National Laboratory was used to test the reconstruction routine.