composites is applied; this assumption creates a uniform cross section for each material

section. Hence, the number of parameters reduces from 81 to 40. Blade 2 is further

simplified by defining the composite layers with isotropic material properties (i.e. eliminating

the Young’s Modulus in the y and z directions). This reduces the number of FE model

input parameters to 36 since fewer values are needed to define the material properties. Blade

4 is created by applying the rule of mixtures to the Blade 3 model, resulting in a uniform

cross section defined with isotropic properties, and this model only has 20 model

parameters. The resulting FE models and the corresponding number of necessary input

parameters are summarized in Table 1.

For solution verification, a mesh convergence study is performed, by which the mesh of the

FE model is successively refined to determine the optimum mesh size. A proper mesh

refinement should yield a solution that converges to an asymptote, so that if the FE model is

further refined there is minimal gain in solution accuracy. Solution verification is important

to ensure that numerical errors have a negligible effect on the estimated model form error.

Figure 6: Six Representative Mesh Refinements in ANSYS

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