Large Blade Manufacturing Cost Studies Using the Sandia Blade Manufacturing Cost Tool and Sandia 100-meter Blades

This report documents large blade manufacturing cost studies using the Sandia Blade Manufacturing Cost Tool (version 1.0). This blade cost model considers costs for blade materials, labor content, and capital equipment, which are all important factors that are affected by blade design decisions. A key feature of the model is the detailed labor operations breakdown. A conceptual labor process for an example 40-meter blade is defined and used as a baseline labor breakdown for comparisons and for upscaling the labor content to larger blades. A methodology for scaling the labor content is applied based on geometric scaling associated with individual labor operations. The scaling trends are also investigated for the materials and equipment portion of the costs. One motivation of this work is to perform manufacturing cost studies and assess manufacturing trends and manufacturing needs for large blades, in particular, for the Sandia 100-meter blades (SNL100-XX series). The tool is demonstrated for the SNL100-00 all-glass baseline blade and the SNL100-01 carbon blade. Example sensitivity studies are performed to demonstrate potential use of the tool for cost tradeoffs studies between materials, labor content, and equipment components of cost for blade manufacturing.