Erosion in wind turbine blade during service life: a quantification approach

Kurzfassung

Erosion of wind turbine blades due to weather, impacts and material degradation are a potential source of plastic emissions to the onshore and offshore environment. Most LCA studies considering the whole life cycle are neglecting these emissions because of unawareness as well as missing data and suitable impact assessment methods. There is limited emphasis in present research to quantify the actual mass loss occurring in real life wind turbines due to erosion. Instead, the description of erosion damage (matrix components, coatings and the fibers) in most cases is of qualitative nature. In an worst case scenario as answer to a request by the German Bundestag, 1395 tonnes per year of material loss for all installations of wind turbine blades in Germany have been estimated [1]. The aim of this work is to provide a more realistic quantification of eroded materials during service life based on data from literature [2] in combination with the data from NREL 5MW [3]. Till date, the link for the weight of the damage along the radius to the total damage has been missing. So was the consideration of real service life and the higher damage occurring in offshore wind turbines as well. In this work, a calculation for a best (optimistic) and worst case (pessimistic) scenario of expected mass loss due to erosion in wind turbine blade is presented and compared against their length. A mathematical function is used for a further processing of the data to understand the above phenomenon for onshore as well as offshore turbines.