Seismic Consideration for High Rise Concrete Wind Turbine Towers

Abstract eng:
Globally increasing demand and cost of energy motivate the Shanghai Science and Technology Development Committee wind energy research program to develop a large wind turbine (LWT) technology that will allow wind systems to compete in regions of low wind speed. Most of current wind turbine powers on world are less than 1.0 MW supported by tubular steel towers and their tower height less than 80 meter. Earthquake load may not be significance to the tower design due to following reasons; first, wind turbine towers often are placed in wide-open fields and high wind gust areas, the wind load from the turbine and direct wind pressure on the tower usually governs the design of the tower; second, steel tubular tower structures usually are lighter than concrete structures, thus, they have less seismic inertial force than that of concrete tower. For large wind turbine towers with the turbine head weight getting heavier, the seismic load very likely becomes governing loading case for a pre-stressed concrete tower, especially in region of the high seismic zones. As tower getting taller and support large turbines, pre-stressed concrete tower solution becomes more competitive in overall cost in the latest study. In this paper a series height of the pre-stressed concrete towers segmental stacked and post-tensioned by tendons are studied and compared with steel tubular towers under prescribed seismic load under different design code including China GB, US IBC 2003 and Euro-code. The tapered tower fundamental dynamic properties are estimated by the Raleigh-Ritz method and compared with FEM results.

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