Carbon Glass Hybrid Materials for Wind Turbine Rotor Blades

Wind turbine rotor blades have seen a strong growth in length and industry is facing new structural problems. New lighter and stiffer materials would be useful to improve the blade design. This research analyses the potential of carbon glass hybrid composites. Three laminates typical of the laminates used in the spar caps and in the trailing edge reinforcement are manufactured and tested: a reference GFRP, a hybrid laminate and a carbon dominated laminate. For the hybrid material, the results show a positive behavior under static tensile and fatigue loads, while relatively low UCS; a positive hybrid effect is denoted. As for the carbon laminate, the high carbon fraction leads to the best performance under all loads but to a poor infusibility during the VARTM process. The experimental research is followed by a computational study using the wind turbine design software package Focus 6 to evaluate the design of hybrid blades. Thanks to the higher stiffness and the better fatigue resistance of carbon fibers, the simulations return very good expectations with the new blade models considerably lighter and slightly cheaper than the baseline model with pure GFRP spar caps. Based on this study, hybrid laminates seem to be an interesting alternative to glass or carbon laminates. Further study on the optimal structure of hybrid laminates is recommended.Aerospace EngineeringWind EnergySustainable Energy Technolog