OPTIMAT BLADES-OPTIMAL AND RELIABLE USE OF COMPOSITE MATERIALS FOR WIND TURBINES -

Wind turbine technology provides maturing means of renewable energy production. Maintaining the wind turbine blades’ reliability in a demanding environment, and for ever increasing blade sizes, is an important challenge. For an adequate design, reliable and accurate design rules and detailed knowledge of the material behavior under various circumstances and load scenarios must be available. The OPTIMAT project, which started in January 2002, aims to help provide this knowledge. This paper introduces and outlines the OPTIMAT project. It describes the rationale behind the project, the organization of the most important tasks and it indicates the foreseen approach to arrive at the project’s ambitious goals.

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