Fraunhofer eyes wind blade savings

Blades account for about 25% of the total cost of a wind turbine

Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy Systems (IWES) has kicked off a €8m ($10.7m) project targeting a more than 10% cut in rotor blade fabrication cost through greater automation.

The five-year BladeMaker scheme aims to make building blades more “cost effective, quicker and [of] a higher quality” by moving away from the largely manual lay-up and curing process used by manufacturers, while exploring improvements to blade design and materials.

A facility – dubbed the BladeMaker Demo-Centre – will also be set up as a national and international centre for research and development into rotor blade production.

“In international competition rotor blade producers are under great cost pressures which we will tackle with automation,” says project manager Florian Sayer. “The BladeMaker project will…

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