Best Selling Books by Alan Robinson

Uses context clues to unlock word meanings and build students' content-area vocabulary.

Advances in passive wind turbine control systems have allowed wind turbines to achieve higher efficiencies and operate in wider inflow conditions than ever before. Within recent years, the adoption of aero-elastically tailored (bend-twist coupled) composite blades have been a pursued strategy. Unfortunately, for this strategy to be applied, traditional means of modeling, designing and manufacturing are no longer adequate. New parameters regarding non-linearities in deflections, stiffness, and aerodynamic loadings must now be implemented. To aid in the development of passive wind turbine system design, a finite element based aero-elastic program capable of computationally predicting blade deflection and twist under loading was constructed. The program was built around the idea of iteratively solving a blade composite structure to reach a maximum aero-elastic twist configuration under elevated wind speeds. Adopting a pre-existing blade geometry, from a pitch controlled small scale (3.5kW) turbine design, the program was tested to discover the geometry bend-twist coupling potential. This research would be a contributing factor in designing a passive pitch control replacement system for the turbine. A study of various model loading configurations was first performed to insure model validity. Then, a final model was used to analyze composite layups for selected spar configurations. Results characterize the aero-elastic twist properties for the selected configurations.