Comparison of numerical modelling techniques for impact investigation on a wind turbine blade

Wind turbine blades are exposed to numerous impact risks throughout their lifetimes. The impact risks range from bird collisions during operation to impacts with surrounding structures at the time of transportation and installation. Impact loads on the fibre composite blades can induce several complex, simultaneously interacting and visually undetectable damage modes and have a high potential to reduce the local and global blade stiffness. An assessment of such impact-induced damages is therefore necessary and usually involves high computational costs using numerical procedures, especially when analysing large composite components. To minimise this computational expense, different numerical…