Large-Scale Additive Manufacturing for Low Cost Small-Scale Wind Turbine Manufacturing

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility worked with XZERES Wind to fabricate small (in comparison to traditional wind energy systems) wind turbine blades using large-scale polymer additive manufacturing (AM). The results of this project showed promise for the use of AM in the production of small wind energy systems. Although, the large-scale polymer AM systems available for this project proved to be too large for this application, ORNL and XZERES Wind were able to prove that AM is a viable opportunity to improve small wind turbine blades.