Composites for Wind Energy Applications
A special issue of Materials (ISSN 1996-1944).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2017) | Viewed by 111489
Special Issue Editors
Interests: composites; wind energy; fracture mechanics; materials testing
Interests: composites; wind energy; micromechanics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The drastic expansion of the renewable energy sector is an important precondition for reducing fossil fuel dependency and preventing global warming. Europe seeks to achieve 20% electricity supply from renewable sources by 2020, increasing offshore wind energy capacity by 21% annually. Such an increase in wind energy generation can be realized practically by installing parks from large and extra-large wind turbines off-shore.
The requirements for wind turbine materials are very strict, far stricter than those for automotive and aerospace materials. While a car can be easily repaired at the nearest service station, and airplane materials can be rather expensive, a wind turbine must be cheap (to ensure competitiveness against common energy sources) and sustain 20 or more years of work without failure (due to the very high costs of offshore repair). Due to such extremal requirements, the development of wind turbine materials represents the forefront of composite development.
Wind turbine blades should sustain a combination of extreme mechanical and cyclic multiaxial loading of variable amplitudes, with environmental and thermal/high humidity/erosion effects. This leads to unexpected failures, with resulting downtimes, loss of revenue, increased operational and maintenance costs, with view of the decreased accessibility of off-shore parks.
Currently, most widely-used composites for wind turbine blades are glass fiber/epoxy composites, while investigations using carbon, aramid and basalt fibers, thermoplastics polymers, and bio-based and nanoengineered materials are under way, and also have the potential of yielding practical applications in the long run.
In this Special Issue, recent works and state-of-the-art overviews on the development, modelling, properties, and manufacturing of composites for wind turbines are presented.
We invite prospective authors to submit their manuscripts for this Special Issue. Full papers, communications, and reviews are all welcome.
Prof. Bent F. Sørensen
Dr. habil. Leon Mishnaevsky Jr.
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- Wind energy
- Composites
- Manufacturing technology
- Strength and fracture
- Reliability
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