Structural Analysis of Small Scale Wind Turbine Blade

During the previous several decades, a lot of research have been performed on the improvements of large-scale wind turbines, and there is a wealth of literature on the subject. However, in comparison to large scale wind turbine blades, small scale horizontal axis wind turbine (SSHAWT) blades have not been subjected to detailed investigations, and there are very less number of literatures available on SSHAWT blades. In this work a fluid structure interface model created in which Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) module is used to calculate the aerodynamic forces and these loads directly imported as load boundary condition in finite element analysis (FEA) module for blade structural analysis. FEA analysis was performed on ANSYS Static Structural module and CFD analysis was performed on ANSYS Fluent module. The blade was also subjected to structural analysis, which was separated into two phases. The first portion focuses on determining the optimum width of spar cap among the cases taken for the study. The second portion seeks to assess the structural strength of different internal support cross-sections of SSHAWT blades and then choose the best one.