Calculation of Environmental Profits with Weight Reduced Core Material in Rotor Blades

Abstract: Construction of wind turbines has increased these recent years and is expected to escalate more in the nearest future. The expansion of wind power as an energy source requires specific and comprehensive transport, when production is far away from the installation site. Generally, the development of turbines has gone towards bigger turbines with longer rotor blades. As the blades grow in length, optimization of weight and sustainability will be more substantial. The turbine blades are subjected to high stresses and therefore the choice of materials for blade design is important. Weight and strength are two very important parameters to take into account. Diab provides the core material to the wind industry and offers a wide variety of different materials with varied density. In this thesis, the environmental profits is examined of wind power with respect to different core materials in the sandwich construction used in the blades in the aspect of weight reduction. During this work, a literature review, calculations and data collection was conducted. The weight reduction with a lighter material is 2,7% and the total environmental profits was 1,2% of CO2 that has been compensated for in form of electricity production. The small amount of environmental profit corresponded to the weight reduction.