Professor Suong Van Hoa, Concordia Centre for CompositesA new manufacturing technique developed by Concordia researchers could make small wind turbines lighter, less expensive and easier to produce.
Using a process known as 4D printing of composites, PhD candidate Emad Fakhimi and Suong Van Hoa, professor at the Concordia Centre for Composites, created the curved blades for vertical-axis wind turbines from flat carbon-fibre composite panels.
Vertical-axis wind turbines are increasingly used on buildings and in urban settings, but their curved blades are typically made using specialized forming processes that require complex molds. These molds add cost, manufacturing time and weight to the final product.
To address this problem, the researchers developed a new, first-of-its-kind "inverse" design procedure. Rather than starting with a particular layup - the arrangement and orientation of carbon-fibre layers - and observing the resulting shape, the researchers began with the desired blade geometry and worked backward to determine how the layers should be arranged and oriented to produce it.
During manufacturing, flat carbon or epoxy laminates are cured and then naturally deform into curved shapes as they cool, thanks to carefully engineered differences in material properties across the layers.
The resulting blades closely matched the shape of commercial aluminum turbine blades while weighing about 80 per cent less. In laboratory tests, turbines fitted with the composite blades rotated faster than those equipped with aluminum blades. The approach could reduce manufacturing costs and expand the use of lightweight composite structures in renewable energy systems and other engineering applications.
The paper was published in the journal Polymer Composites.
Read the paper: "Development of Vertical Wind Turbine Blades Using 4D Printing of Composites"
