Damped structural dynamics models of large wind-turbine blades including material and structural damping

The paper presents a brief description of composite damping mechanics for blade sections of arbitrary lamination and geometry. A damped 3-D shear beam element is presented enabling the assembly of damped structural dynamic models of blades with hollow multi-cell tubular laminated sections. Emphasis is placed to the inclusion of composite material coupling effects, first in the blade section stiffness and damping matrices and finally into the stiffness and damping matrices of the finite element. Evaluations of the beam element are presented, to quantify the material coupling effect on composite beams of simple box sections. Correlations between predicted and measured modal frequencies and damping values in small model Glass/Epoxy are also shown. Finally, the damped modal characteristics of a 35m realistic wind-turbine blade model design, are predicted.