Structural assessment of wind turbine blade bonded joints based on Fracture Mechanics

Carlos Amézqueta*, Iñaki Nuin, Marcos Del Río, Mercedes Sanz

National Renewable Energy Centre (CENER)
Wind Energy Department
Ciudad de la Innovación
31621 Sarriguren, Navarra, Spain
*e-mail: camezqueta@cener.com
Phone: +34 948 25 28 00

Introduction
Most current wind turbine blades are manufactured in separated components that are
bonded together. These joints are critical for the blade structural reliability, thus extensive
research has been conducted on this topic by the engineering community. The Structural
Mechanics area in the Wind Energy Department of the Spanish National Renewable
Energy Centre (CENER) has been working in the last years in the design and assessment of
load carrying bonded joints within a wind turbine blade.

Approach
The traditional stress based approach to address the structural assessment of these
bonded joints is extremely FE mesh size dependent when working with local effects. To
solve this limitation CENER has developed a methodology based on a Linear Fracture
Mechanics approach. The energetic theory that lies behind this methodology gives stable
results: as the mesh of the structural FE model is refined, the energetic results converge to
a stable value.

The mayor advantage of the methodology developed is it’s direct application for the
design and assessment of the wind-turbine blades’ bonded joints, thanks to the reduced
coupons and subcomponents tests, its low computation time and the straight pre & post-
processing.

Main body of abstract

The first step was to characterize the bonded joint allowable in terms of Linear Fracture
Mechanics: the Critical Strain Energy Release Rates (Gc) for pure Mode I and Mode II.
CENER designed ad-hoc glued coupons and tested them at its facilities, obtaining results
for the following failure locations:
 Cohesive failure in the adhesive. Tests to bulk adhesive coupons were carried out,
both in pure Mode I and Mode II.
 Figure 1 Pure Mode I bulk adhesive test (ISO 13586, SENB coupon)

 Interfacial failure along the composite substrate – adhesive interface. DCB tests
(for pure Mode I) and ENF tests (for pure Mode II) were performed.

Figure 2 ENF test (pure Mode II) with a Teflon insert at the interface with the composite substrate

Allowable were computed according to the particular tests standard’s formulae. In order
to calculate the energetic values from Finite Element models that reproduced the tests
behaviour, CENER developed and validated an in-house application code which interfaces
with MSC.Patran and MSC.Nastran and is able to compute the Strain Energy Release Rates
in the three propagation or debonding components (Mode I, II & III). Values obtained by
both methods (standard’s formulae and FE model) were compared and conclusions were
derived. The calculated GIc and GIIc values were different for the various coupon
topologies. After some discussion, it was assumed that the lowest value of each pure
Mode was the allowable for the global bonded joint.

Secondly CENER designed a small- to- medium- scale subcomponent representative of the
bonded joint between the blade spar-cap and the shear web flange. The test set-up
including loading fixtures, tooling and boundary conditions was also designed in order to
load the subcomponent in such a way that the bondline bore similar Mode mixity states as
in the actual blade’s joint. Subcomponents were manufactured according to the same
variables followed in the coupons manufacturing. CENER performed static tests at its
facilities for various set up configurations, in which the adhesive in the debonding region
was subjected to different combinations of peeling (Mode I) and shear (Mode II). CENER’s
in-house code was used to compute the three available Strain Energy Release Rates at
every test load level, which were compared against the allowable obtained from coupon
tests. Thus, debonding loads for each test set up configuration were predicted. Test
results and FE simulations showed good correlation, enabling the validation of CENER in-
house code and the fine tuning of the methodology employed.

Making use of the developed methodology, the assessment of the bonded joints
structural behaviour between the shear webs and the spar-cap of a reference WT blade
was performed. Critical areas were identified based on the stress level in the adhesive
layer, for a subsequent detailed calculation based on the Fracture Mechanics theory.
Intensive research was carried out to obtain the most balanced sub-modelling approach,
in terms of pre & post- processing time and accuracy of results, which afterwards was
used for the computation of the available debonding energies (GI, GII, GIII) at the critical
areas identified by the stress assessment. Thanks to the fine tuning performed in the
subcomponent correlation, a Failure Index (FI) was computed for each critical area,
assessing whether debonding occurred under the reference static load-cases.

Conclusion
A methodology to address the design and structural assessment of load carrying bonded
joints in WT blades under monotonic loads was developed. The methodology includes
material characterization at the coupon level and tuning at the subcomponent level, and
was successfully applied to a full scale blade FE model. The methodology developed by
CENER is directly applicable in an industrial context, both in terms of testing and
computation efforts.

Learning objectives
Delegates who attend this presentation will get insight into the proposed methodology to
assess the structural reliability of bonded joints in WT blades. They will understand the
fundamentals of the methodology and the required testing and computation tasks in
order to properly apply it to their particular needs.