Fraunhofer IWES is leading a new initiative aimed at reducing production time for wind turbine blades.
The BladeFactory project has received €7m funding from Germany’s ministry for economics affairs and energy and will last three-and-a-half years.
IWES and 14 project partners will develop and test new production methods, as well as analyse a 3D laser measurement system used to assess the quality of blade production.
The work will be carried out at IWES’ demonstration centre in Bremerhaven, Germany.
IWES said current technology takes about 24 hours to produce a rotor blade following steps that must be performed one after the other in the main mould tool.
BladeFactory project manager Roman Braun said: “To shorten the production time, we want to perform various processes simultaneously and move some of the work away from the main mould tool to other devices.
“The introduction of robust and parallel production processes offers huge potential cost savings. The production procedure is rendered more efficient and material surcharges as well as reworking due to quality issues can be reduced.”
IWES said that a direct production procedure for mould tools was developed during a preceding project called BladeMaker, which reduced the production time for moulds to three months from six months.
BladeFactory will use the mould production procedure to create mould tools with a cooling function.
“This will enable the curing process to be optimally controlled and shortened, whilst also increasing the quality of the components,” IWES said.