• Rotor blade
• wind energy
• optimization
• production
• simulation

Within the project wind power roadmapping, regarding the planning of production capacity through integrative roadmapping, a novel interdisciplinary approach is to develop. By combining the product, technology and factory planning through the integrated approach synergies can be reached to improve the planning results and times. The production of rotor blades for wind turbine as reference scenario of the project is currently dominated by manual labor and mostly organized as site fabrica-tion. The growing cost pressure can be replied by the introduction of new production technologies and lean factory concepts. However, the transfer of proven technolo-gies and concepts from industries such as the aerospace industry fails due to differ-ent product requirements and objectives.
The Objective of this thesis is the development and testing of a methodology for evaluating innovative production technologies and factory concepts within the wind turbine industry. For this purpose, promising technologies and factory concepts are to implement in a simulation model of a rotor blade production to analyse their ef-fects (lead time, output quantity, etc.) within the process chain. These simulation results should be used in a planning tool to compare the different solutions by means of these performance indicators as well as other criteria like machine or labor costs. Due to this evaluation roadmaps for production technologies and factory con-cepts to optimize the production of rotor blades should be created as final result.
To achieve this objective have to be investigated literature and references for inno-vative production technologies and factory concepts (layouts, workforce, shift sys-tem, production organization, etc.) to optimize the rotor blade production first. Sec-ondly methods and criteria in the planning tool will be used to select some of the possible solutions. To analyse the performance of the technologies and factory con-cepts within the process chain they are to implement in the simulation model. For this reason, different combinations of machines, layouts, workforce, etc. should be compared by using the simulation model. Finally the simulation results are used for the further evaluation in the planning tool and to create the roadmaps for production technologies and factory concepts.