Research activities

The research topics for WMC in national and European research projects are amongst others:

• Material behaviour under complex and fatigue loading
• New materials
• Condition monitoring
• Reliability of design codes
• Reliability of full scale testing
• Connection methods
• Design recommendations and standards on full scale testing of wind turbine rotor blades

Fundamental research

WMC has initiated the EU project OPTIMAT BLADES to investigate the behaviour of Fibre Reinforced Plastics and is WP 3.1 leader for materials in the UPWIND project.

Industrial research

These projects include:

• Testing of materials
• Numerical analyses
• Design evaluation
• Verification tests on mechanisms
• Strength and fatigue behaviour of components and connections
• Development of design software (FOCUS)
• Full scale verification tests on (sub)components such as:
  • Wind turbine rotor blades (or parts thereof)
  • Wind turbine pitch bearings and hubs
  • Connections

Other services

WMC also offers services to other institutes and companies for setting up (blade) test facilities. These services can include specification of equipment (and building constraints), delivery of (part of) the equipment, training including manuals, procedures and work instructions, dedicated software for control, measurement and data processing.