Study on Casting Instead of Traditional Forging for Main Shaft of Megawatt Wind Turbine

Turbine main shaft is one of the most important components for wind turbines. Nowadays, the main shafts of megawatt wind turbine have been mainly manufactured by forging technology. Although forged spindle has good performance, forging process is so complicated that it generally takes long production cycle and high cost. This paper has been undertaken in an attempt to describing a novel method of gravity casting to manufacture wind turbine. It has been found that some performances such as the tensile strength and the yield strength of the casted main shaft are higher than those of the forging standard ones, while other performances dependent on various positions of the sampling present different performance distribution.