Dr Peter Greaves

Dr Peter Greave is ORE Catapult’s Principal R&D Engineer – Blade Structures and is responsible for projects involving structural design and testing of wind turbine blades. Since completing his doctoral studies on bi-axial fatigue testing of blades, Peter has continued to be heavily involved in the development of the technology (which aims to perform a faster and more realistic fatigue test on blades by accounting for the fact that in real life blades are continually bent about two axes at once) with tests on a 40m, 62m, 88m blade (the largest in the world at the time) and is now once more involved in testing the longest blade in the world – the 107m blade manufactured by LM Wind Power for the GE Haliade-X.

Peter is also an experienced structural analyst – a recent example of this is the Leading Edge for Turbines (LEFT) project aimed at a technology transfer between the helicopter industry and wind turbines of a nickel-cobalt erosion protection shield with extremely good erosion performance. Peter’s work was focused on validating the adhesive joint using a sub-modelling approach and cohesive zone elements. Fracture mechanics testing was also performed to validate the joint.

More recently, Peter has been working with the holistic wind turbine optimisation tool ATOM (co-developed with Bristol University under the Wind Blade Research Hub). The tool is currently being used for several blade projects at ORE Catapult, including:

• The Joule Challenge, where it will be used to develop a baseline blade design to assess loads for several new composite components in a 20MW floating wind turbine, as well as considering more advanced blade design philosophies.
• Carbo4Power, where it has been used to develop a structurally feasible baseline blade for the project (whilst keeping the original blade geometry of the IEA 15MW reference turbine)
• Cornwall Flow Accelerator – taking the Carbo4Power blade as a starting point, ATOM was used to perform an aero-structural optimisation on the blade which led to a 1.5% increase in AEP, 11% reduction in blade mass and a 2.3% reduction in LCoE.
• SusWind – using the Cornwall Flow Accelerator blade as a baseline, 5 variants using more environmentally friendly materials have been optimised to assess how the change in material properties impacts blade bill of materials. The information will be used to perform a life cycle analysis for the blades using different materials.

He has an MEng in Mechanical and Design Engineering from Newcastle University, an MSc in Renewable Energy (also from Newcastle University) and a PhD from Durham University. He is also a chartered engineer (CEng).