Techno-economic Model and Simulation for Wind Blade Manufacturing

摘要

The ongoing demand to reduce the LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) drives thewind industry to explore new technologies that will advance the state-of-the-art forcomposite wind blade manufacturing. These new technologies span the range fromnew resins and fibers, to improved blade designs, to innovative manufacturingtechniques. However, since the introduction and widespread adoption of vacuumassistedresin-infusion techniques for blade making, there has been no significantchange in the basic labor-intensive manufacturing process for wind blade production.In the current research, a Techno-Economic Model (TEM) and a complementarysimulation of a generic wind blade manufacturing facility are developed. The TEMis sufficiently robust to take into account the very rapid product refresh cycle (andconcurrent consumption of capital), differences in blade lengths, and the potentialfuture composite technologies such as carbon fiber and thermoplastics that couldimpact the blade design and resulting manufacturing processes. To investigate thelong-term costs and benefits, the TEM also takes into account the cash flows over amulti-year period so that the true value of improvements can be identified and usedto justify capital investment in automation and other process changes. Thecomplimentary simulation is built in DELMIA. DELMIA allows for a visual tool toevaluate how changes in the manufacturing steps will impact process flow andtiming. The integration of these two models into a full Techno-Economic Analysis(TEA) provides a comprehensive tool to identify opportunities for increasingthroughput and for exploring the impact of capital investments.