Designing a test rig for structural static-load testing of small horizontal axis wind turbine rotor blades

Abstract

This paper presents a design of a test rig for structural static load testing of small horizontal wind turbine blades. It is a next step after the success of the DeVie project, a join-research project to boost the wind energy knowhow between Germany and Vietnam. According to the IEC-61400-23 standard for full scale structural testing of rotor blades, and based on existing facilities of HCMUT, especially the aerospace engineering lab. and the engineering mechanics lab., we propose a prototype of a test-rig for structural static load testing of rotor blades. A rotor blade of 4 meters in length, manufactured by China, is used in the case study of our structural static-load test-rig. This paper used the reverse engineering method to determine the blade geometry and performance, since the blade was provided and not designed from scratch. Detailed steps to determine the test load for the rig are the most important, based on the blade design and the wind condition of Vietnam, a study case was set to start the process. Since that required a lot of experience and know-how, beside the work and research from our university, other critically important information was kindly provided by the German's experts in the field. Result of the blade tip displacement are wildly used in this industry to validate the blade design. Our test rig result in 0.289 meters were compared to the reverse engineering and simulation result of 0.28 meter with QBlade/FAST in the same blade loading shown well similarity, this result validated our work process. Future revision of the test rig is promised to provide more function such as fatigue test mode, higher load capacity, faster testing time as well as more accurate result, aiding the domestic market of composite wind turbine blade manufacturing which is still in its infancy.