Model Wind Turbine Blade Mold Fabrication

A compilation of my senior design project at Clarkson University - Potsdam, New York.

My name is John Hayes and I am a Mechanical Engineer. I was the Project Manager of my senior project team. We were tasked with inventing an innovative method of storm protection for an offshore wind turbine.

The video starts with the design, which is a 1:72 scale of a NREL design for a 5 MW wind turbine. The airfoil data was found on the University of Illinois' website ( http://bit.ly/mYylaP ). The twist distribution and bulkhead spacing was given by a NREL research paper. Airfoil data was inputted into Excel, MatLab, and finally Autodesk Inventor. A loft feature was used to extrude the blade's shape.

The next step was fabricating the blade. At first, we attempted making a blade by stacking foam and shaping it with putty. This resulted in tedious work and we were forced to rethink our strategy. Unlike SolidWorks, Inventor does not have a mold making package, so we designed a two part mold by selecting points along the leading and trailing edge.

The video ends with us using polyurethane expanding foam to get the blades shape. The foam core did not provide the structural integrity we desired in our model. Not shown in the video is our use of fiberglass and resin. We waxed each half of the mold and laid in fiberglass. We allowed each half to cure and clam shelled the result. The outcome was desirable, but showed room for improvement. If I were to do it again, I would use and foam core and wrap it in fiberglass ( RTM Lite Method ) to eliminate the excess material at the leading and trailing edge.

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Science & Technology

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