SectionBuilder: An innovative finite element tool for analysis and design of composite rotor blade cross-sections

SectionBuilder is a finite element based tool for analysis and design of composite rotor blade cross-sections. The tool can create the cross-sections with parametric shapes and arbitrary configurations. It has the ability to generate single- and multi-cell cross-sections with arbitrary lay-ups where the material properties for each layer can be defined on the basis of the design requirements. It can create the variation of thickness of skin and D-spars for rotor blades by considering ply drops. Cross-sections are often reinforced by core material for constructing realistic rotor blade cross-sections. The tool has the ability to integrate core materials into the cross-sections. After meshing the cross-section, the tool determines the sectional properties using finite element analysis. This tool computes sectional properties including stiffness matrix, compliance matrix, mass matrix, and principal axes. A visualization environment is integrated with the tool for visualizing the stress and strain distributions over the cross-section. The detail about the development steps and application of SectionBuilder is presented in this paper.