Accomplishments
Parametric Optimizations for Wind Turbine Blade Applications: A Statistical Analysis
- Abstract
In dusty environment the wind turbine blade surfaces are subjected to hard impact of sand particles coming with the stream of water jet in rainy season. Material of wind blade gets eroded due to repeated impact of sand slurry. Epoxy composites reinforced with four different weight fractions of woven jute fiber reinforcement are developed. To study the effect of various operational and material parameters on slurry jet erosive wear behavior of these composites in an interacting environment erosion tests are carried out. For this purpose, slurry jet type erosion test rig and the design of experiments approach utilizing Taguchi’s orthogonal arrays (L16) are used. The findings of the experiments indicate that the rate of erosive wear of composites by impact of slurry containing solid erodent particles is greatly influenced by the control factors. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) technique is performed on measured data and S/N (signal to noise) ratios to quantify singnificance of individual control factor on performance output.