The study for strength of welds of the wind turbine tower

풍력 발전 시스템 타워의 용접부 강도 연구

Recently, as the global warming by fossil fuels and the steep rise of the oil price become social issues, the interest for renewable energy producing system is increasing rapidly. Among these, the wind turbine is most highlighted because of its economic competitiveness. The tower is one of the main components of wind turbine, which occupying about 20% of overall turbine costs. The tower access door located to base part of the tower, is used to enter the tower. This is the main structural weak points because of door hole, weldment, etc. And so are the weldments between the cans and the flanges. In this study, for the top flange part of the tower, by FEM using ANSYS, we retrieved the maximum von Mises stress on that and carried out fatigue analysis using stresses at such weak points.