Case Study: CADFEM achieves more realistic wind turbine blade simulation with Digimat

Continuous Fiber Reinforcement in Wind Turbine Rotor Blades

CADFEM GmbH, an ANSYS Competence Center and provider of engineering services, faced the challenge of designing larger, lighter wind turbine rotor blades with high rotational inertia. They needed to make optimal use of expensive composite materials and required a flexible, realistic simulation approach to investigate new design concepts. To bridge the gap between micro and macro scale analysis, they partnered with MSC Software and utilized the Digimat multi-scale material modeling platform.

The solution from MSC Software involved glass and carbon fiber reinforced plastics via mean field homogenizationely isotropic properties and analyzing failure directly in both the epoxy and fiber phases. The results showed that carbon fiber reinforcement had significantly lower failure indicators than glass fiber and failed on different ply levels, proving the critical importance of the advanced material modeling for an accurate design.

CADFEM

Martin Kracht

Product Manager DIGIMAT