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isogeometric dynamic-data-driven analysis of fatigue damage in wind turbine blades

A large-deformation, isogeometric rotation-free Kirchhoff–Love shell formulation is equipped with a fatigue model for fully reversed cyclic loading to efficiently and accurately simulate fatigue failure in composite wind turbine blades. The fatigue model developed in [1] is based on coupled approach of residual stiffness and strength. Stiffness degradation is represented as change of damage variable per loading cycle where the damage growth law is established in a form of damage initiation and damage propagation functions. To integrate equations for damage growth, the cycle jump technique is applied. The computations are done for a certain set of fatigue loading cycles at appropriately chosen intervals and the effect of stiffness degradation is extrapolated over corresponding intervals in an accurate manner. The model has been applied to simulate a fatigue failure of the CX-100 wind turbine blade that was fatigue loaded until failure using a hydraulic displacement excitation technique in Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The model is updated in a dynamic manner at several points during fatigue loading using sensor data. The final failure as well as stress redistribution due to stiffness degradation in damaged zones is captured in the experimentally-predicted number of loading cycles. Efforts are underway to incorporate fatigue damage in full-scale FSI simulations of wind turbine blades in real operating conditions.

References

[1] W. Van Paepegem and J. Degrieck (2004), Simulating inplane fatigue damage in woven glass fibre-reinforced composites subject to fully-reversed cyclic loading, Fatigue and Fracture of Engineering Materials & Structures, 27(12), 1197-1208.

Author(s):

Artem Korobenko    
University of California, San Diego
United States

Xiaowei Deng    
University of California, San Diego
United States

Jinhui Yan    
University of California, San Diego
United States

Yuri Bazilevs    
University of California, San Diego
United States