After three and a half years, our project “SensoTwin – Sensor-integrated Digital Twin for High-Performance FRP Applications” was successfully completed on 31 July 2024. The project was carried out in cooperation with the Technology Campuses Hutthurm and Freyung of the Deggendorf Institute of Technology in the scope of the initiative MaterialDigital funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Within the project SensoTwin, a structural digital twin of a wind turbine rotor blade was developed. A new material ontology was designed to formally describe the material class of fibre-reinforced polymers (FRPs) to support the collection of knowledge for the digital twin. Experimental investigations focused on characterising material properties under thermal, chemical and mechanical (static and cyclic) influences, ranging from the constituent level (individual fibres, matrix, fibre-matrix interface) to the composite level. The digital representation of the rotor blade includes the as-built state to be able to map possible process defects (missing plies, ply misorientation, ply waviness and varying thickness) and their influence on the structural performance of the rotor blade. The virtual blade can be subjected to a curing simulation (process simulation) in the first step and an operating simulation (static and cyclic structural simulation) in the second step. Realistic temperature cycles for curing and wind data can be used to determine the operational loads. Finally, the digital twin allows a prognosis of fatigue-critical regions and an estimation of the remaining lifetime of the rotor blades. More information about the project can be found here.

We would like to thank the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for funding the project SensoTwin under the funding code 13XP5121, the VDI Technologiezentrum as project management agency and the Platform MaterialDigital. We would also like to thank our partners at the Technology Campuses Hutthurm and Freyung of the Deggendorf Institute of Technology for the cooperation at the highest scientific standards.

We look forward to further shaping the future of digitising materials sciences.