Multidisciplinary design of wind turbine blades

The impressive growth of the wind energy in the recent years makes necessary to improve the traditional design tools in order to respond to the high competitiveness. One of the most challenging component to be designed is the blade that plays an important role in the wind turbine performance and loads. The design of blades involves several technical tasks such as the geometry design, structural layout design, controls setting, loads calculations and structural verifications. In the traditional design process these tasks are performed by different experts in a sequential manner. At the end of each design loop, changes are applied to the design due to failures to fulfill any of the requirements of the design: excessive loads and/or deflections, low energy yield, non acceptable cost, transportation or logistic problems, undesirable surface fairness, etc. The implementation of the changes in the following design loop is decided with the basis of the intuition and experience of the different experts involved. In contrast to this procedure, a new process is proposed in this thesis with an important core stage based on optimization techniques that takes into account the complex interactions between the different technical tasks with a holistic view. The optimization engine is a code developed in this thesis that calculates, with the support of different subordinate codes, the wind turbine responses in terms of loads and performance under the design variables from the assorted technical tasks. Different research studies have been carried out in order to provide methods based on data analysis to obtain knowledge about the relationships between design variables and outputs. In spite of the complexity of the different types of calculations involved in the optimization, the computational cost is affordable in a real case design. The results of this thesis have been successfully applied to serial production blades.