Since commercial wind turbines were introduced around 1980, the length of rotor blades has increased substantially up to 80m with consequently higher demands on availability and failure prevention.
One of the typical failure mechanisms of rotor blades in operation are fatigue cracks in adhesive bonds often caused by air voids with a-priori unknown properties, which results from the manufacturing process.
In this contribution, the usage of computer tomography as non-destructive testing (NDT) on a representative sub-component, called the Henkel beam, is proposed for air void detection and quantification.
By using the NDT data, structural failure is simulated by means of a finite element approach under polymorphic uncertainties to consider diverse uncertainty sources in the data acquisition.
On the one hand, aleatory irreducible uncertainties are described with stochastic variables and on the other hand, interval and fuzzy variables are used for epistemic reducible uncertainties.
For solving the problem under polymorphic uncertainties, different computational methods within a MATLAB framework called PolyUQ are used and compared with regard to accuracy and efficiency.DFG, 273721697, SPP 1886: Polymorphe Unschärfemodellierungen für den numerischen Entwurf von Strukture
