The wind turbine blade is going to be part of experiments at the test lab Large Scale Facility at DTU Wind Energy. The experiments are going to test prototype equipment that later is going to be used for testing wind turbine blades in research projects and for companies.
The tests are part of the Blatigue project in which Siemens Gamesa is participating, together with DTU Wind Energy and other partners (please see below). The project is supported by EUDP and Villumfonden and the experiments aim to test the so-called exciter which is developed in the project and used to test the durability of wind turbine blades by dynamic testing of the blades.
It is the first time that such a large wind turbine blade is being tested in the Large Scale Facility. The blade weighs approximately ten tons. This is also the first time the largest test stand in the Large Scale Facility is used.
“The experiments are fatigue tests which are performed on the blade. We make the blade oscillate in different patterns”, says Kim Branner, who is the leader of the Blatigue project. Previously, only smaller blades and thus smaller oscillations have been made, but now researchers are going to look at the behavior of the exciter when exposed to a larger blade. “We expect the exciter to be even better for large blades that oscillate at low frequency compared to small high frequency blades”, Kim Branner elaborates. However, the blade is so large that about four meters of the tip should be cut off before the blade can be mounted on the test stand.
These are precisely such large structures which in the future are going to be tested in the Large Scale Facility, with the purpose of gaining a better understanding of failure in large structures such as large wind turbine blades.