Application of Shell Element in Temperature Field Predication of WindTurbine Blade

For anti-icing wind turbine blades, hot air heating method is widely adopted due to its various advantages such as easy maintenance. This article proposes a temperature field predication method for wind tribune blade based on AN- SYS SHELL131 shell element. Firstly, by building a solid model, it verifies the feasibility of merging plies of wind tur- bine blades of the same material. Then it uses an anti-icing apparatus with hot air heating to measure the temperature field data by experiment. Based on characteristics of SHELL131 element, it merges and simplifies plies of an actual wind tur- bine blade to obtain an appropriate shell element model. Finally, after computing the temperature field of the whole blade by ANSYS, it verifies the feasibility of this method by showing good agreement between the simulation and the experi- mental results. In practice, this method can be applied to temperature field computations for varies types of wind turbine blades and other laminated structures, and it can provide reliable theoretic guidance for heat transfer analysis of wind tur- bine blade and research on anti-icing equipment of blades.