Application of shell element in temperature field predication of wind turbine blade

Abstract

For anti-icing wind turbine blades, hot air heating method is widely adopted due to its various advantages such as easy maintenance. This article proposes a temperature field predication method for wind tribune blade based on ANSYS SHELL131 shell element. Firstly, by building a solid model, it verifies the feasibility of merging plies of wind turbine blades of the same material. Then it uses an anti-icing apparatus with hot air heating to measure the temperature field data by experiment. Based on characteristics of SHELL131 element, it merges and simplifies plies of an actual wind turbine blade to obtain an appropriate shell element model. Finally, after computing the temperature field of the whole blade by ANSYS, it verifies the feasibility of this method by showing good agreement between the simulation and the experimental results. In practice, this method can be applied to temperature field computations for varies types of wind turbine blades and other laminated structures, and it can provide reliable theoretic guidance for heat transfer analysis of wind turbine blade and research on anti-icing equipment of blades.