A consortium of 14 companies and organisations led by European R&D body Fraunhofer IWES has kicked off a €7m ($8.1m) scheme aiming to slash the time of rotor blade fabrication by “parallelising” different elements of current production methods.
The BladeFactory project, which builds on the German institute’s BladeMaker demonstration programme launched in 2013, is targeting reduction from the current industry average of around 24 hours per blade ‘blank’ by moving fabrication away from being performed “one after the other” in the main mold.
