Development of a cross-sectional finite element for the analysis of thin-walled composite beams like wind turbine blades

A method for structural analysis of thin-walled composite beams like wind turbine blades is presented. This method is based on the Nonhomogeneous Anisotropic Beam Section Analysis (NABSA) which consists in discretizing the beam cross section using finite elements. The proposed implementation uses 3-node line cross-sectional finite elements with nodes having rotational degrees of freedom to describe the cross-sectional warping displacements. Solutions obtained using this approach were verified against the corresponding analytical or numerical solutions. Agreement was very good to excellent for the computation of cross-sectional properties and distribution of stresses, strains and warping displacements for a broad range of possible composite beam behaviors including geometric and material couplings, open sections, multicell sections, and arbitrary laminates. For thin-walled layered structures, the proposed method provides models with fewer degrees of freedom than equivalent models based on a two-dimensional discretization of cross sections using triangular or quadrilateral elements such as conventional NABSA or VABS which suggests that computation time could be reduced.