Structural analysis and optimization of large cooling tower subjected to wind loads based on the iteration of pressure

The wind load is always the dominant load of cooling tower due to its large size, complex geometry and thin-wall structure. At present, when computing the wind-induced response of the large-scale cooling tower, the wind pressure distribution is obtained based on code regulations, wind tunnel test or computational fluid dynamic (CFD) analysis, and then is imposed on the tower structure. However, such method fails to consider the change of the wind load with the deformation of cooling tower, which may result in error of the wind load. In this paper, the analysis of the large cooling tower based on the iterative method for wind pressure is studied, in which the advantages of CFD and finite element method (FEM) are combined in order to improve the accuracy. The comparative study of the results obtained from the code regulations and iterative method is conducted. The results show that with the increase of the mean wind speed, the difference between the methods becomes bigger. On the other hand, based on the design of experiment (DOE), an approximate model is built for the optimal design of the large-scale cooling tower by a two-level optimization strategy, which makes use of code-based design method and the proposed iterative method. The results of the numerical example demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method.