Modelling the pultrusion process of off shore wind turbine blades

This thesis is devoted to the numerical modelling of the pultrusion process for industrial products such as wind turbine blades and structural profiles. The main focus is on the thermo-chemical and mechanical analyses of the process in which the process induced tresses and shape distortions together with the thermal and cure developments are addressed. A detailed survey on pultrusion is presented including numerical and experimental studies available in the literature since the 1980s. Keeping the multi-physics and large amount of variables involved in the pultrusion process in mind, a satisfactory experimental analysis for the production requires considerable time which is obviously not a cost-efficient approach. Therefore, the development of suitable computational models is highly desired in order to analyse the process for different composite manufacturing aspects such as heat transfer, curing and solid mechanics.