• Wind and Structures
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.353-367
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• 2015

As concrete wind-turbine towers are increasingly being used in wind-farm construction, there is a growing need to understand the behavior of concrete wind-turbine towers. In particular, experimental evaluations of concrete wind-turbine towers are necessary to demonstrate the dynamic characteristics and load-carrying capacity of such towers. This paper describes a model test of a prestressed concrete wind-turbine tower that examines the dynamic characteristics and load-carrying performance of the tower. Additionally, a numerical model is presented and used to verify the design approach. The test results indicate that the first natural frequency of the prestressed concrete wind turbine tower is 0.395 Hz which lies between frequencies 1P and 3P (0.25-0.51 Hz). The damper ratio is 3.3%. The maximum concrete compression stresses are less than the concrete design compression strength, the maximum tensile stresses are less than zero and the prestressed strand stresses are less than the design strength under both the serviceability and ultimate limit state loads. The maximum displacement of the tower top are 331 mm and 648 mm for the serviceability limit state and ultimate limit state, respectively, which is less than L/100 = 1000 mm. Compared with traditional tall wind-turbine steel towers, the prestressed concrete tower has better material damping properties, potential lower maintenance cost, and lower construction costs. Thus, the prestressed concrete wind-turbine tower could be an innovative engineering solution for multi-megawatt wind turbine towers, in particular those that are taller than 100 m.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.73 no.5
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• pp.487-500
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• 2020

Stiffeners can be utilised to enhance the strength of thin-walled wind turbine towers in engineering practise, thus, structural performance of wind turbine towers by means of different stiffening schemes should be compared to explore the optimal structural enhancement method. In this paper two alternative stiffening methods, employing horizontal or vertical stiffeners, for steel tubular wind turbine towers have been studied. In particular, two groups of three wind turbine towers of 50m, 150m and 250m in height, stiffened by horizontal rings and vertical strips respectively, were analysed by using FEM software of ABAQUS. For each height level tower, the mass of the stiffening rings is equal to that of vertical stiffeners each other. The maximum von Mises stresses and horizontal sways of these towers with vertical stiffeners is compared with the corresponding ring-stiffened towers. A linear buckling analysis is conducted to study the buckling modes and critical buckling loads of the three height levels of tower. The buckling modes and eigenvalues of the 50m, 150m and 250m vertically stiffened towers were also compared with those of the horizontally stiffened towers. The numbers and central angles of the vertical stiffeners are considered as design variables to study the effect of vertical stiffeners on the structural performance of wind turbine towers. Following an extensive parametric study, these strengthening techniques were compared with each other and it is obtained that the use of vertical stiffeners is a more efficient approach to enhance the stability and strength of intermediate and high towers than the use of horizontal rings.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.1115-1144
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• 2015

Current climate conditions along with advances in technology make further design and verification methods for structural strength and reliability of wind turbine towers imperative. Along with the growing interest for "green" energy, the wind energy sector has been developed tremendously the past decades. To this end, the improvement of wind turbine towers in terms of structural detailing and performance result in more efficient, durable and robust structures that facilitate their wider application, thus leading to energy harvesting increase. The wind tower industry is set to expand to greater heights than before and tapered steel towers with a circular cross-section are widely used as more capable of carrying heavier loads. The present study focuses on the improvement of the structural response of steel wind turbine towers, by means of internal stiffening. A thorough investigation of the contribution of stiffening rings to the overall structural behavior of the tower is being carried out. These stiffening rings are placed along the tower height to reduce local buckling phenomena, thus increasing the buckling strength of steel wind energy towers and leading the structure to a behavior closer to the one provided by the beam theory. Additionally to ring stiffeners, vertical stiffening schemes are studied to eliminate the presence of short wavelength buckles due to bending. For the purposes of this research, finite element analysis is applied in order to describe and predict in an accurate way the structural response of a model tower stiffened by internal stiffeners. Moreover, a parametric study is being performed in order to investigate the effect of the stiffeners' number to the functionality of the aforementioned stiffening systems and the improved structural behavior of the overall wind converter.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.507-519
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• 2018

In this paper, damage assessment in wind-turbine towers using vibration-based artificial neural networks (ANNs) is numerically investigated. At first, a vibration-based ANNs algorithm is designed for damage detection in a wind turbine tower. The ANNs architecture consists of an input, an output, and hidden layers. Modal parameters of the wind turbine tower such as mode shapes and frequencies are utilized as the input and the output layer composes of element stiffness indices. Next, the finite element model of a real wind-turbine tower is established as the test structure. The natural frequencies and mode shapes of the test structure are computed under various damage cases of single and multiple damages to generate training patterns. Finally, the ANNs are trained using the generated training patterns and employed to detect damaged elements and severities in the test structure.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.38 no.6
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• pp.445-459
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• 2024

To model the aeroelasticity in vortex-induced vibrations (VIV) of slender tubular towers, this paper presents an approach where the aerodynamic damping distribution along the height of the structure is calculated not only as a function of the normalized lateral oscillation but also considering the local incoming wind velocity ratio to the critical velocity (velocity ratio). The three-dimensionality of aerodynamic damping depending on the tower's displacement and the velocity ratio has been observed in recent studies. A contour map model of aerodynamic damping is generated based on the forced vibration tests. A sectional calculation procedure based on the spectral method is developed by defining the aerodynamic damping locally at each increment of height. The proposed contour map model of aerodynamic damping and the sectional calculation procedure are validated with full-scale measurement data sets of a rotorless wind turbine tower, where good agreement between the prediction and measured values is obtained. The prediction of cross-wind response of the wind turbine tower is performed over a range of wind speeds which allows the estimation of resulting fatigue damage. The proposed model gives more realistic prediction in comparison to the approach included in current standards.

• The KSFM Journal of Fluid Machinery
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.50-54
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• 2012

Wind-power generation, which is recently drawing attention as one of renewable energies across the world, has been developed mainly by Europe. As the demand for the wind-power generation rose and the amount of wind-power generation increased, the studies on megawatt-class wind-power system have been active, and the use of composite with such properties as less weight, more strength, anti-corrosion and environment-friendliness has required gradually. In other word, wind turbine tower will be required to be lighter, more reliable and more consistent. Therefore it is necessary to lose weight of the wind turbine tower. This points squarely toward hybrid/composite tower production growing. It is important to note however that hybrid/composite tower production as it is today is flawed and that there are ways to improve greatly on the performance of these towers in manufacturing process and in their in-service performance. Through this, we have some detail on the current process and its advantage of cost and weight of towers.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.569-588
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• 2017

The aim of this paper is to present a method to obtain the dynamic response of a wind turbine tower in time domain by means of the generation of time series and to estimate the associated fatigue damage by means of a Rainflow counting algorithm. The proposed method is based on assuming the vortex shedding is a bidimensional phenomena and on following a classical modal superposition method to obtain the structure dynamic response. Four different wind turbine tower geometric configurations have been analyzed in a range of usual wind velocities and covering extreme wind velocities. The obtained results have shown that, depending on the turbulence intensity and the mean wind velocity, there are tower geometric configurations more advantageous from the fatigue load standpoint. Consequently, the presented model can be utilized to define assembly strategies oriented to fatigue damage minimization.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.79-100
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• 2017

The use of wind energy resources is developing rapidly in recent decades. There is an increasing number of wind farms in high wind-velocity areas such as the Pacific Rim regions. Wind turbine towers are vulnerable to tropical cyclones and tower failures have been reported in an increasing number in these regions. Existing post-disaster failure case studies were mostly performed through forensic investigations and there are few numerical studies that address the collapse mode simulation of wind turbine towers under strong wind loads. In this paper, the wind-induced failure analysis of a conventional 65 m hub high 1.5-MW wind turbine was carried out by means of nonlinear response time-history analyses in a detailed finite element model of the structure. The wind loading was generated based on the wind field parameters adapted from the cyclone boundary layer flow. The analysis results indicate that this particular tower fails due to the formation of a full-section plastic hinge at locations that are consistent with those reported from field investigations, which suggests the validity of the proposed numerical analysis in the assessment of the performance of wind-farms under cyclonic winds. Furthermore, the numerical simulation allows to distinguish different failure stages before the dynamic collapse occurs in the proposed wind turbine tower, opening the door to future research on the control of these intermediate collapse phases.

• The KSFM Journal of Fluid Machinery
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.55-60
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• 2012

The purpose of this study is to investigate the buckling load of filament-wound composite towers for large scale wind-turbine using finite element method(FEM). To define material properties, we used both the effective property method and the stacking properties method. The effective properties method is to assume that composite consists of one ply. The stacking properties method is to assume that composite consists of some stacked plies. First, linear buckling analysis of the tower, filament-wounded with angles of [${\pm}30$] was carried out by two methods for composite material properties, the stacking method and the effective method. and FE analysis was performed for the composite towers according to filament winding angles of [${\pm}30$], [${\pm}45$], [${\pm}60$]. FE analysis results using the stacking properties of the composite were in good agreement with the results by the effective properties. The difference between FEM results by material properties methods was approximately 0~2.3% in buckling Analysis and approximately 0~0.6% in modal analysis. And above the angle of [${\pm}60$], there was a little change of buckling load.

• Journal of Wind Energy
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.23-36
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• 2024

In this study, a health monitoring system was developed for the two most vulnerable parts of a wind tower support structure: the connection between steel towers (L-Flange) and the concrete foundation-steel tower connection. To select assessment parameters for health monitoring, detailed FEM analysis was conducted using the ABAQUS program. Additionally, a testbed was established near the Jeju Woljeongri wind turbine farm to evaluate the applicability of measurement data by installing sensors. Through computational analysis and relevant criteria review, we defined limits for measurement parameters by vulnerable section. We categorized the structural safety evaluation into four stages: normal, caution, warning, and danger, and selected management criteria for each stage. From this, an algorithm to evaluate safety was developed, and a visualized monitoring platform based on the established critical parts monitoring system was developed.