Welcome

 Project

 Updates

Safety

 Academics

 Group

 Client

Acknowledgements

 Links



Aeolus Blades
2004-2005


Mechanical Engineering
Senior Design Project
 

Please read: Disclaimer

  
.

Project Information

To find specific project information, please use the Quick Links drop-down menu at top-right. Course deliverables (academic requirements) can be found by clicking Academics at left. General background information and a project overview are found below.

 


Background

Wind energy is the fastest growing electricity source in the world. With annual growth rates of 30% and continuing cost reduction, wind energy is expected to become the lowest cost source of available electricity. These advances have been made possible by the economies of large utility-sized turbines.

Small wind turbine technology has seen far less advancement and there is still a lot of room for improvement in this area. There is a strong interest in using these smaller turbines in domestic applications and in remote areas. One of the main cost challenges associated with making small turbines feasible lies with the blades. The use of engineered wood for these blades may offer a significant opportunity for turbine cost reduction if the blades can meet design requirements.
 

Project Overview
 

The Aeolus Blades project involved redesigning and manufacturing wind turbine blades from engineered wood in an attempt to reduce the material and manufacturing costs involved in using traditional fiberglass or carbon fiber manufacturing methods.

Wood possesses material properties superior to those of fiberglass and carbon fiber in terms of fatigue-stress endurance, but is inferior to both of those materials when considering stiffness and strength-to-weight ratio. New engineered wood products, with grains oriented parallel to their length, such as laminated veneer lumber (LVL) and oriented strand lumber (OSL), have made it possible to reconsider wood as a wind turbine blade material. These products exhibit improved flexural strength and stiffness when compared to conventional wood. They are also less expensive than fiberglass and carbon fiber.

Traditional wood, fiberglass and carbon fiber turbine blade manufacturing techniques are extremely labour-intensive and thus expensive. We looked at reducing manufacturing costs by shaping the blades with a Computer Numeric Control (CNC) router.

The two blades that we built are in operational testing on a Wenvor 25kW wind turbine at the Atlantic Wind Test Site on Prince Edward Island, as of the beginning of April 2005. The blades are 4.8m long with a maximum chord length of 460mm and a thickness of 114mm. Each blade weighs approximately 51kg, which is comparable to the carbon fiber blades which have been used on the Wenvor turbine and lighter than the fiberglass blades that were once used. Carbon fiber and fiberglass blades of this size cost in the order of $3000 each, and we set out to reduce this to $1000 in a proposed batch run of 50 blades.