Wind Turbine Blade Fatigue Loading

Wind-turbine blades rarely fail from a single overload — they fail from tens of millions of small stress reversals accumulated over a 20-25 year design life. This simulator renders a rotating 3D turbine and tracks the root bending stress each blade sees every revolution, combining a gravity-driven flap-wise load reversal with a rotationally-sampled turbulence gust. Each completed revolution is logged as one stress cycle, corrected for mean stress with the Goodman relation, converted to an allowable cycle count via a Basquin (power-law) S-N curve, and summed into a live Miner's-rule damage accumulator — the same bookkeeping wind-turbine structural engineers use to certify a blade design. Adjust wind speed, rotor speed and turbulence intensity to see which one actually shortens fatigue life the most.