Development Of Virtual Prototype Of Large Gantry Type Filament Winding/placement Machine

Energy crisis is one of the most urgent problems in modern human society. Due to the advantage of cleanliness and renewability, wind power has attracted worldwide attention. Developing high-power wind turbine, and exploring wind power resources more safely and effectively have become a hot topic of national research. Modern wind power generation system usually consists of an impeller, cabin, transmission system, generator, pitch system, yaw system, brake system, tower and control systems. The tower is the important support structure of wind turbine, and its load case is extremely complex. With the increase of the fan unit capacity, the size of the tower can be increased to a hundred meters or even larger. Therefore, good static and dynamic behaviors are demanded for the reasonable tower structure. And it is of great significance to avoid breaking off, flexing, resonance or buckling for wind turbines’ safe and stable operation.Fiber-reinforced composite materials have the advantages of lightweight, high strength, easy molding, corrosion resistance, shock resistance and other characteristics. Applying it to wind power systems and developing new composite materials with advantages are a major trend in the wind power industry. However, compared with developed countries, China’s fiber-reinforced composite molding technology is relatively backward. Breaking the blockade of foreign technology and developing fiber placement machine with independent intellectual property rights are imminent.This paper studied steel tower and composite combined tower respectively with 2 MW double-fed wind generator as the object, and then designed gantry type fiber tape placement machine for forming composite tower. Dissertation work includes the following aspects:First, the structure size of steel conical tower is determined and the tower load in different cases is calculated referred to relative documents; the tower model is built by ANSYS Workbench software and static analysis, linear buckling analysis, modal analysis are carried out in storm case, then the static and dynamic characteristics of the tower is evaluated.Second, the composite combined tower structure concept is proposed and its molding process is studied; the composite laminate design and optimization is fulfilled in ACP, and the material type, optimal ply sequence and thickness of different areas are determined; the finite analysis of ply result is done by ANSYS Workbench, and the merits between composite and steel tower based on stiffness, strength and stability characteristics are compared.Third, a gantry type tape placement machine with 4 independent placing function and 7 degrees of freedom based on composite tower are developed and its virtual prototype is established by CATIA software. The ADAMS software is used to finish the kinematics simulation of placing machine and tape placing head, and the motion curve of the key parts is obtained; its motion law is evaluated.This paper provided theoretical basis for design of wind generator tower and proved the feasibility of composite lamination method. The design of tape placement head can serve as reference for other fiber winding/placing machine.