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2014
Conference Paper
Titel
BladeMaker - Advancing and demonstrating automated manufacturing of rotor blades
Abstract
Rotor blades for wind turbines have a significant (25%-30%) share of wind turbine costs and are determining loads and thereby costs for the other parts as well. Current labor-intensive manufacturing leads to high tolerances, requiring high safety factors and less-than-optimal parameters, and reaches its borders with current and upcoming blade dimensions. Automated manufacturing promises significant improvements leading to higher reliability, higher blade value and ultimately lower cost-of-energy for the entire turbine. The BladeMaker research project, funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, brings together the wind industry, material suppliers, process experts and automation technology suppliers to advance current automation concepts, develop new concepts, transfer ideas from other industries and demonstrate the results in a demo center at Fraunhofer IWES capable of building 25m sections of 40m blades. Based on an extensive cost model and process analysis, BladeMaker will finally suggest parts of the blade manufacturing process to be automated for different batch sizes and quantify the expected savings in material and labor costs as well as the feedback to blade design. The target decrease in total blade cost is above 10%. Processes in the BladeMaker scope include advanced mold concepts with carbon fiber heating systems, automated continuous and discrete (pick and place) fiber placement, automated roving placement, innovative core foam production in the main mold, automated glue application and automated finishing processes. Based on these processes, the material parameters and possibly the blade design will be adjusted to maximize the automation benefits.