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Abstract. Increasing growth in land-based wind turbine blades to enable higher machine capacities and capacity factors is creating challenges in design, manufacturing, logistics, and operation. Enabling further blade growth will require technology innovation. An emerging solution to overcome logistics constraints is to segment the blades spanwise and chordwise, which is effective, but the additional field-assembled joints result in added mass and loads, as well as increased reliability concerns in operation. An alternative to this methodology is to design slender flexible blades that can be shipped on rail lines by flexing during transport. However, the increased flexibility is challenging to accommodate with a typical glass-fiber, upwind design. In a two-part paper series, several design options are evaluated to enable slender flexible blades: downwind machines, optimized carbon fiber, and active aerodynamic controls. Part 1 presents the system-level optimization of the rotor variants as compared to conventional and segmented baselines, with a low-fidelity representation of the blades. The present work, Part 2, supplements the system-level optimization in Part 1 with high-fidelity blade structural optimization to ensure that the designs are at feasible optima with respect to material strength and fatigue limits, as well as global stability and structural dynamics constraints. To accommodate the requirements of the design process, a new version of the Numerical Manufacturing And Design (NuMAD) code has been developed and released. The code now supports laminate-level blade optimization and an interface to the International Energy Agency Wind Task 37 blade ontology. Transporting long, flexible blades via controlled flapwise bending is found to be a viable approach for blades of up to 100 m. The results confirm that blade mass can be substantially reduced by going either to a downwind design or to a highly coned and tilted upwind design. A discussion of active and inactive constraints consisting of material rupture, fatigue damage, buckling, deflection, and resonant frequencies is presented. An analysis of driving load cases revealed that the downwind designs are dominated by loads from sudden, abrupt events like gusts rather than fatigue. Finally, an analysis of carbon fiber spar caps for downwind machines finds that, compared to typical carbon fibers, the use of a new heavy-tow carbon fiber in the spar caps is found to yield between 9 % and 13 % cost savings.

This publication shows advantages and possible applications for variable transmission drivetrains within rotorcraft. The power requirement of a generic helicopter with constant and variable rotor speed was calculated. Various drive train technologies that support a variable transmission were described. The prospects of this technology, its influence on the dynamic behaviour of a rotor and further areas that need to be investigated extensively are presented. This technology is applicable to some rotorcraft architecture. Requests from the rotorcraft industry underline the necessity for future rotorcraft using variable rotational speeds. However, the A160 or the EC145 and Mi-8 already show the potential of this technique. Reduction of required power of the rotor should be possible and also an extension of the flight envelope towards higher flight speeds, higher altitudes, better manoeuvrability, etc. By using a variable transmission gearbox, turbine and auxiliary units can still be driven at their design point, independent of the current rotor speed. Excessive loads may occur when discrete speed transmission are used. Frictional or fluid transmissions with continuous variable ratio may fail due to overheating. Other continuous concepts are favoured. The design of a variable speed rotor focuses specifically on its dynamic behaviours and on structural and geometrical optimisation to avoid operation at rotational speed resonance frequencies. Morphing structures may support this. Some rotorcraft architectures can benefit from a variable speed rotor technology. It probably will increase efficiency, decrease noise levels, fuel consumption and CO 2 production, and the flight envelope may be extended.

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This work presents a numerical framework to investigate distributed aerodynamic control devices for application in large wind turbines. Tool capabilities were extended to facilitate multiple aerodynamic polar tables. The airfoil aerodynamics characteristics were automatically determined, and blade-pitch, generator-torque, and trailing-edge-flap controllers were tuned in-the-loop according to a specific blade design. This automated workflow allows analysis and optimization of trailing-edge flaps, enabling codesign studies. Results targeted reductions of root-flap-bending moment derivatives. The applied trailing-edge-flap control reduced the standard deviation of root-flap-bending moments by more than 6% and benefit related parameters, e.g., reduce blade-tip deflections, by up to 8%. Because of varying thrust distributions along the blade span, different flap designs have nonlinear characteristics in terms of the control objective and show best performance when located at the radial position with maximum thrust. In general, larger flaps provide a greater influence to reduce the target control objective.