• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
• /
• v.33 no.2
• /
• pp.95-101
• /
• 2020

The wind turbine blades should be designed to possess a high stiffness and should be fabricated with a light and high strength material because they serve under extreme combination of lift and drag forces, converting kinetic energy of wind into shaft work. The goal of this study is to understand the basic knowledge required to curtail the process time consumed during the construction of small wind turbine blades using carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) prepeg composites. The configuration of turbine rotor was determined using the QBlade freeware program. The fluid dynamics module simulated the loads exerted by the wind of a specific speed, and the stress analysis module predicted the distributions of equivalent von Mises stress for representing the blade structures. It was suggested to modify the shape of test specimen from ASTM D638 to decrease the variance in measured tensile strengths. Then, a series of experiments were performed to confirm that the bladder compression molded CFRP prepreg can provide sufficient strength to small wind turbine blades and decrease the cure time simultaneously.