Spread in Modal Data Obtained From Wind Turbine Blade Testing

Paper in proceeding, 2013

This paper presents a pre-study for an on-going research project in experimental dynamic substructuring, initiated by the SEM Substructures Focus Group. The focus group has selected a small wind turbine, the Ampair 600W, to serve as test bed for the studies. The turbine blades are considered in this study. A total of twelve blades have been tested for modal properties in a free-free configuration. The data has been acquired and analysed by students participating in the undergraduate course ”Structural Dynamics - Model Validation” at Chalmers University of Technology. Each blade was tested by different students as part of their required course work to account for spread in modal properties between the blades. A subset of the blades were tested independently multiple times to account for variability in the test setup. Furthermore, correlation analysis of test data was made with Finite Element model eigensolution data of the blade.