| The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) performs full-scale laboratory testing of wind turbine blades to meet wind turbine design standards, reduce machine cost, and reduce the technical and financial risk of deploying mass-produced wind turbine models. NREL currently uses a blade-mounted resonant test system called the Universal Resonance Excitation (UREX) to perform fatigue tests on blades up to 50 m in length. The Base Excitation Test System (BETS) is a new system for resonant blade fatigue testing being developed at NREL. The BETS is expected to result in faster, safer, and more cost effective fatigue testing of wind turbine blades. The objective of this project is to design a small-scale prototype of the BETS capable of fatigue testing a 9m blade. This project includes analytical and numerical strength of materials calculations, and solid-modeling of the prototype. BETS components have been modeled and checked against fatigue calculations to ensure it will not fail during a full scale fatigue test of a 9m blade. This prototype will allow NREL to validate dynamic models of the BETS to aid in designing a full scale BETS capable of testing very large blades. |
