World’s longest wind turbine blades

The LM 61.5 P is the world’s longest wind turbine blade, developed by LM Glasfiber in close collaboration with REpower Systems – the German manufacturer of the biggest wind turbine in the world. These blades were a major challenge in every respect, and our engineers were able to expand the envelope for what is possible in blade production.

See how impressive it is when the world's longest wind turbine blades are produced and subsequently mounted to a wind turbine. Click here to see the video.

Weight is crucial

The larger the blade, the more important it is to focus on the weight, in order to reduce the stresses on the turbine during operation. Such weight reductions have a knock-on effect on the dimensioning of all other components in the wind turbine, paving the way for significant savings. By further developing LM Glasfiber’s FutureBlade technology, our engineers were able to design a blade with an impressively low weight – less than 18 tons.

The challenge of manufacturing a large blade is not proportional to its size –doubling the length does not mean doubling the challenges involved. However, development of a large blade to achieve the ideal combination of capacity, weight and price is a major task. From a mathematical point of view, the rule-of-thumb is that the weight of the blade increases by the cube of the length. There was therefore considerable focus on the weight aspects during development work on the LM 61.5 P blade. As a result of this targeted effort, this normally standard constraint has now been overcome.

Smart engineering

In conjunction with developing the world’s longest blades, LM Glasfiber focused strongly on material selections. Our consistent strategy is to identify the best material for each tiny component of the large blade without incurring unnecessary extra costs. More about our materials research

Along with choosing and developing these materials, this major project required further work on developing our production processes. We therefore used a robot cart to lay out the glass for the load-bearing laminate in the blades, a task that requires the utmost precision. More about automation of our production processes

Neighbour to nuclear power station

The first set of LM 61.5 P prototype blades are mounted on the 5M prototype wind turbine near Brunsbüttel in North Germany, where they have delivered power to the North German electricity grid since late 2004. [foto]

Flash animation with all the data about this large blade