To address the manufacturing and transportation challenges of large wind turbine blades, adhesive joints in modular blades have become a research focus. This study investigates six typical adhesive joint configurations for CFRP laminates using quasi-static three-point bending experiments and cohesive-zone finite element simulations. The adhesive interface is modeled with a bilinear traction–separation law using zero-thickness cohesive elements to capture damage initiation and propagation. Among the six designs, the double-slope joint exhibits the best static performance, achieving the highest peak load of 1017.26 N and showing delayed damage evolution. The superiority of the double-slope design is further examined at the blade level via a numerical cantilever model of equal-section modular blade segments under flapwise and edgewise loading. The predicted peak loads reach 9.82 × 107 N (flapwise) and 5.51 × 107 N (edgewise), ranking the double-slope joint highest among the investigated configurations. The findings show that the double-slope joint improves load capacity and resistance to degradation, and reveal failure mechanisms of adhesive joints, providing theoretical support for blade structural design.
YANG et al. (Sat,) studied this question.