Project Overview
Carbo4Power was set up to develop a new generation of lightweight, high strength, multifunctional, digitalised materials for offshore wind and tidal turbine rotor blades – to increase their operational performance and durability while reducing the cost of energy production (below 10ct€/kWh for wind turbines and 15ct€/kWh for tidal), maintenance and their environmental impact.
The four-year Carbo4Power project, which completed at the end of 2024, was funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020, and led by the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), with 18 partners including ORE Catapult.
What did ORE Catapult achieve?
Teams across ORE Catapult demonstrated proof of concept experimental trials for the manufacture of sustainable products, such as functionally graded fibre mats that could be used to reinforce adhesives for functionally graded joints, or glass fibre reinforced plastic (GFRP) panels.
To combat the industry-wide challenge of blade leading edge erosion, the team finalised a low-cost novel thin film test method for initial comparison and selection of leading edge protection (LEP) materials, and further developed an advanced rain erosion test that better evaluates LEP for use in offshore or alternative environments. A sensor test system was created for the rain erosion test rig for testing erosion sensors and the reliability of Structural Health Monitoring sensors.
Explainer: Leading edge erosion
Leading edge erosion on a turbine blade due to temperature, moisture and UV radiation can be caused by rain, hail or wind-borne debris impacting the blade during rotation.
Protecting against the erosion of the leading edge of an offshore wind turbine blade is a major area of research for the offshore wind industry. With offshore wind farms designed and built for a 25-year operational life span, ensuring that turbine blades operate at maximum energy generating capacity, often in harsh environmental conditions, is of crucial importance to keeping costs down and energy production up.
As part of Carbo4Power, the ORE Catapult team also designed modular 1:20 Scale demonstration blades. The structural performance of these blades was validated using finite element simulations. The model was created using detailed images of the blades which were developed using a novel solid finite element mesh generator, a key output of the project for ORE Catapult.
ORE Catapult’s cost analysis showed that modular blades have several potential advantages – the tooling (the moulds in which the blade materials are laid into before being infused with plastic and cured to produce the final blade shape) would be cheaper if the blade was not made in one part, and it is easier to automate the manufacturing process and control quality on smaller parts. Modular blades could also be customisable, for example, using a longer tip section if the blade was going to be used at a site with low wind speeds.
What next?
The European Commission’s Innovation Radar recently highlighted some of the work that ORE Catapult undertook as part of Carbo4Power, naming the organisation as a ‘key innovator.’
The solid wind turbine blade finite element model mesh generator addresses the needs of existing markets.
Solid finite element models are not widely used because they are more difficult to create than the more widely used shell models, but they offer several advantages. They represent the true blade geometry (features such as the adhesive joints which connect the parts of the blade together are in the right place), they can capture failure of blade materials through their thickness (a failure mode that is much more common in the field than the in-plane failure captured by shell models), and they provide a much more accurate prediction of how resistant the blade is to being twisted (its torsional stiffness – a key input to the simulation models used to predict annual energy production and loading on the wind turbine).
The Innovation Radar platform builds on the information and data gathered by independent experts involved in reviewing ongoing research and innovation projects funded by the European Commission.
Find out more about our Principal R&D Engineer – Blade Structures Peter Greaves’ experience working on the Carbo4Power project in his blog here.
