TY - CONF A1 - Ghafafian, Carineh A1 - Trappe, Volker T1 - Fully-reversed fatigue behavior of scarf joint repairs for wind turbine blade shell applications N2 - Due to manufacturing imperfections which can propagate to damage under in-service loads, wind turbine rotor blades, made primarily of glass fiber reinforced polymers (GFRP), often fail significantly before their design life. To enable a quick and cost-effective return to service, localized repairs can be executed by technicians in the field, directly accessing the blades by suspended roping. Scarf joint repairs, shown to be highly efficient with a smooth load transition across angled joint walls and a restored aerodynamic profile, are the focus of this study. The damage mechanisms of these structures were examined under fully-reversed mechanical cyclic loading with a load ratio R = -1, which was made possible on the coupon scale by a custom designed anti-buckling support. The number of cycles to failure were compared across load levels. While the scarf joint ratio was held constant at 1:50, known from industry and literature to be a good compromise between restored mechanical properties and repair size, the layup sequence was varied between small-to-large and large-to-small. Hereby the effect of the presence of resin pockets and fiber orientation mismatch between the parent and repair structure on the failure mechanism as well as fatigue strength of ±45° GFRP scarf joint repair structures was studied. Strain development across the joint length was measured to assess stiffness degradation in addition to the fatigue strength recovery of scarf joint structures with respect to pristine reference specimens. Grayscale analysis was used to monitor the damage state leading to fracture across the specimens. Post-mortem fractography analysis with light microscopy described the global failure mechanisms as well as local damage distribution within the structure, all of which provided insight to critical variables in scarf joint GFRP structures under fully-reversed mechanical cyclic loading, allowing for the tailoring of such repairs on wind turbine blade shells for maximum restoration of service life. T2 - 20th European Conference on Composite Materials (ECCM20) CY - Lausanne, Switzerland DA - 26.06.2022 KW - Glass fiber reinforced polymers KW - Scarf repairs KW - Fatigue PY - 2022 AN - OPUS4-55638 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - CONF A1 - Ghafafian, Carineh A1 - Trappe, Volker ED - Vassilopoulos, A. P. ED - Michaud, V. T1 - Fully-reversed fatigue behavior of scarf joint repairs for wind turbine blade shell applications T2 - Composites meet sustainability - Proceedings of the 20th European conference on composite materials, ECCM20, 26-30 June, 2022, Lausanne, Switzerland N2 - To enable a quick and cost-effective return to service for wind turbine blades, localized repairs can be executed by technicians in the field. Scarf repairs, shown to be highly efficient with a smooth load transition across angled joint walls and a restored aerodynamic profile, are the focus of this work. The failure mechanisms of these structures were examined under quasi-static tensile and fully-reversed cyclic loading. While the scarf ratio was held constant at 1:50, the repair layup was varied between large-to-small and small-to-large. The effect of the presence of resin pockets and the fiber orientation mismatch between parent and repair material on the restored strength of BIAX ±45° glass fiber reinforced polymer scarf joint structures was studied. T2 - 20th European Conference on Composite Materials CY - Lausanne, Switzerland DA - 26.06.2022 KW - Fatigue KW - Scarf repairs KW - Glass fiber reinforced polymers PY - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-569646 UR - https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/298799 SN - 978-2-9701614-0-0 VL - Vol. 5 - Applications and structures SP - 195 EP - 201 PB - Composite Construction Laboratory (CCLab) CY - Lausanne AN - OPUS4-56964 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -