Brian Lau Verndal Bak

Project title

Damage-Tolerant Designs for Long Term Endurance of Next-Generation Wind Turbine Blades

What is your project about?

In the coming decades, many new wind turbines will be installed at a rate that puts the production capacity of wind turbine blades under severe pressure. My project is about developing an adhesive assembly concept that enables an efficient manufacturing process where the components of the wind turbine blade are assembled in the longitudinal direction of the blade. This places great demands on the strength and fatigue resistance of the adhesive joint, which is currently impossible to achieve. We will develop a new fatigue-resistant adhesive joint concept that is achieved through a balanced interaction of mechanisms across length scales. We will develop a machine learning based multiscale simulation model to determine the parameters needed to achieve the optimal balance. The model will be partly based on micromechanical experiments.

How did you become interested in your particular field of research?

My interest in my research field started as a boy in the form of a fascination with cool equipment made of fibre composite materials. It was exotic machines like racing cars and my archery gear and bikes. During my mechanical engineering studies, I was fascinated by the high complexity and the challenge of predicting how a composite structure behaves, and not least, how structural damage can develop. Today, my interest in the field is motivated by the academic challenge of predicting how and when composite structures break under given conditions and from the important role composite materials have for the green transition.

What are the scientific challenges and perspectives in your project?

There are complicated interactions between damage mechanisms across length scales from the diameter of a hair to several meters and on a time scale from seconds to years in the adhesive technology that is the subject of this research. This presents some exciting challenges in characterizing them in the laboratory and in the formulation of simulation models that can be used to predict damage development. We will, among other things, apply time-series machine learning models to learn the response of the micromechanical damage mechanisms to different load combinations and apply this to a structural-scale simulation model.

What is your estimate of the impact, which your project may have to society in the long term?

The knowledge and the models we will develop in the project will make the production of high-performance fibre composite constructions faster, cheaper, and higher quality. This is important for the green transition, as both price and quality are decisive parameters for how quickly we can switch to the efficient wind turbine blades, aircraft, and vehicles of the future. The high fatigue resistance of the adhesive joint concept will also imply more damage-tolerant structures that can be in use for a long time and thus create a more sustainable consumption of materials.

Which impact do you expect the Sapere Aude programme will have on your career as a researcher?

I am grateful for the unique opportunities this grant gives me to pursue my research ideas and to establish a position at the forefront of this new research area. There are critical unsolved challenges in the domain between new production methods and new approaches to the structural design of composite structures, which I look forward to solving in this project and my further research. The grant also gives me the opportunity to establish an international research network targeted at this topic with excellent researchers who will contribute to this and future projects.

Background and personal life

I am married to Heidi, who is a lawyer. Together we have Frederik and Magnus, who are 4 and 6 years, respectively. We live in a country house close to Aalborg that we renovated ourselves. In my spare time, I enjoy spending time in our large garden where we always have some on-going projects. In addition, I enjoy being active on a mountain bike in the nearby forest where it also turns into quite a few walks. Furthermore, my family and I love skiing.