Study of fatigue damage in wind turbine blades

The inspection of damages detected in some blades of 300 kW wind turbines revealed that the nature of these damages was probably due to a fatigue mechanism. The causes that had originated the failure (superficial cracks, geometric concentrator, abrupt change of thickness) have been studied, verifying, by means of the simplified evaluation procedure of fatigue life of the “Germanischer Lloyd” (GL) standard, that these causes can explain the failure detected in the period of time in which it happened.