How to Automate Composite Wind Turbine Blade Fabrication

Rapid material placement and quick-cure molding systems combine to reduce lay-up, infusion and curing time by 50 percent while producing consistently high-quality parts.

MAG IAS (Hebron, KY) is revolutionizing the manufacture of composite wind-turbine blades with two patent-pending technologies: Rapid Material Placement System (RMPS) and quick-cure molding system for wind blades combine to reduce labor content by two-thirds, double throughput, and produce a consistently high-quality blade from the start of a shift to the end.

The Rapid Material Placement System (RMPS) brings integrated manufacturing – with automation and repeatable process control – to what has largely been a manual or piecemeal-automated process. RMPS is an automated blade molding facility unto itself, capable of spraying in-mold coatings, dispensing/lay-up of glass and carbon fiber materials, and dispensing/application of adhesive. It brings 3 m/sec (10 ft/sec) lay-up speed to placement of materials in blade skin, spar cap, and sheer web molds, with laser- and vision-based wrinkle detection in cross or longitudinal directions. Depending on the laminate schedule, the system can reduce lay-up time 85 percent on a 45 m blade.

Programmed off line, the CNC-controlled system consists of a gantry system with multi-axis end effectors capable of manipulating spray heads and adhesive applicators, as well as tooling for spooling and placing materials. After application of gel-coat with spray-head tooling, a ply-generator with a ten-roll magazine of material cuts and dispenses plies to the lay-up end effector on the gantry. The lay-up end effector spools up the material supplied by the ply generator. As the fabric is paid out onto the mold, a pair of articulating powered brushes smoothes it to the tool surface. The lay-up system is mechanically repeatable to ±2 mm, with application tolerance of ±5 mm.

Two such gantry systems adjacent to one another can each produce a 45 m blade-shell half in less than two hours, with half the manual labor of conventional methods. The gantry system rides on rails that are flush with the floor. It also carries bulk supply systems for gel-coat and adhesive. The RMPS is controlled by a CNC and powered with programmable drives and servomotors. Off-line programming software developed by MAG creates the CNC code from imported CAD data.