• Wind and Structures
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• 제21권6호
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• pp.727-753
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• 2015

A double-skinned composite tubular (DSCT) wind power tower was suggested and automatic section design software was developed. The developed software adopted the nonlinear material model and the nonlinear column model. If the outer diameter, material properties and design capacities of a DSCT wind power tower are given, the developed software performs axial force-bending moment interaction analyses for hundreds of sections of the tower and suggests ten optimized cross-sectional designs. In this study, 80 sections of DSCT wind power towers were designed for 3.6 MW and 5.0 MW turbines. Moreover, the performances of the 80 designed sections were analyzed with and without considerations of large displacement effect. In designing and analyzing them, the material nonlinearity and the confining effect of concrete were considered. The comparison of the analysis results showed the moment capacity loss of the wind power tower by the mass of the turbine is significant and the large displacement effect should be considered for the safe design of the wind power tower.

• 한국소음진동공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국소음진동공학회 2009년도 춘계학술대회 논문집
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• pp.78-83
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• 2009

In this study, computer applied engineering (CAE) techniques are fully used to conduct structural and dynamic analyses of a whole huge wind turbine system including composite blades, tower and nacelle. For this study, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to predict aerodynamic loads of the rotating wind-turbine blade model. Multi-body dynamic structural analyses are conducted based on the non-linear finite element method (FEM) by using super-element method for composite laminates blade. Three-dimensional finite element model of a wind turbine system is constructed including power train(main shaft, gear box, coupling, generator), bedplate and tower. The results for multi-body dynamic simulations on the wind turbine's critical operating conditions are presented in detail.

• International Journal of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering
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• 제10권1호
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• pp.9-20
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• 2018

Due to integrated stochastic wind and wave loads, the supporting platform of a Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) has to bear six Degrees of Freedom (DOF) motion, which makes the random cyclic loads acting on the structural components, for instance the tower base, more complicated than those on bottom-fixed or land-based wind turbines. These cyclic loads may cause unexpected fatigue damages on a FOWT. This paper presents a study on short-term fatigue damage at the tower base of a 5 MW FOWT with a spar-type platform. Fully coupled time-domain simulations code FAST is used and realistic environment conditions are considered to obtain the loads and structural stresses at the tower base. Then the cumulative fatigue damage is calculated based on rainflow counting method and Miner's rule. Moreover, the effects of the simulation length, the wind-wave misalignment, the wind-only condition and the wave-only condition on the fatigue damage are investigated. It is found that the wind and wave induced loads affect the tower base's axial stress separately and in a decoupled way, and the wave-induced fatigue damage is greater than that induced by the wind loads. Under the environment conditions with rated wind speed, the tower base experiences the highest fatigue damage when the joint probability of the wind and wave is included in the calculation. Moreover, it is also found that 1 h simulation length is sufficient to give an appropriate fatigue damage estimated life for FOWT.

• 한국태양에너지학회 논문집
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• 제37권1호
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• pp.1-14
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• 2017

A series of coupled time domain simulations considering stochastic waves and wind based on five 1-h time-domain analyses are performed in normal operating conditions. Power performance and tower base Fore-Aft bending moment and pitching motion response of the floating spar-buoy wind turbine with 2 MW direct-drive PMSG have been analyzed by using HAWC2 that account for aero-hydro-servo-elastic time domain simulations. When the floating spar-buoy wind turbine is tilted in the wind direction, maximum of platform pitching motion is close to $4^{\circ}$. Statistical characteristics of tower base Fore-Aft bending moment of floating spar-buoy wind turbine are compared to that of land-based wind turbine. Maximum of tower base Fore-Aft bending moment of floating spar-buoy wind turbine and land-based wind is 94,448 kNm, 40,560 kNm respectively. This results is due to changes in blade pitch angle resulting from relative motion between wave and movement of the floating spar-buoy wind turbine.

• 한국공간구조학회논문집
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• 제15권1호
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• pp.65-73
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• 2015

This paper presents the structural model verification process of whole wind turbine blade including blade model which proposed in Part1 paper. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Phase VI wind turbine which the wind tunnel and structural test data has publicly available is used for the study. In the Part1 of this paper, the processes of structural model development and verification process of blade only are introduced. The whole wind turbine composed by blade, rotor, nacelle and tower. Even though NREL has reported the measured values, the material properties of blade and machinery parts are not clear but should be tested. Compared with the other parts, the tower which made by steel pipe is rather simple. Since it does not need any considerations. By the help of simple eigen-value analysis, the accuracy of structural stiffness and mass value of whole wind turbine system was verified by comparing with NREL's reported value. NREL has reported the natural frequency of blade, whole turbine, turbine without blade and tower only models. According to the comparative studies, the proposed material and mass properties are within acceptable range, but need to be discussing in future studies, because our material properties of blade does not match with NREL's measured values.

• Wind and Structures
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• 제24권4호
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• pp.385-403
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• 2017

In recent years, the wind energy has played an increasingly important role in national energy sector of many countries. To harvest more electric power, the wind turbine (WT) tower structure becomes physically larger, which may cause more risks during long-term operation. Associated with the great development of WT projects, the number of accidents related to large-scaled WT has also been increased. Therefore, a structural health monitoring (SHM) system for WT structures is needed to ensure their safety and serviceability during operational time. The objective of this study is to develop a hybrid damage detection method for WT tower structures by measuring vibration and impedance responses. To achieve the objective, the following approaches are implemented. Firstly, a hybrid damage detection scheme which combines vibration-based and impedance-based methods is proposed as a sequential process in three stages. Secondly, a series of vibration and impedance tests are conducted on a lab-scaled model of the WT structure in which a set of bolt-loosening cases is simulated for the segmental joints. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed hybrid damage detection method is experimentally evaluated via its performance during the damage detection process in the tested model.

• Ocean Systems Engineering
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• 제1권1호
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• pp.95-111
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• 2011

Increasing numbers of floating offshore wind turbines are planned and designed these days due to their high potential in massive generation of clean energy from water depth deeper than 50 m. In the present study, a numerical prediction tool has been developed for the fully-coupled dynamic analysis of FOWTs in time domain including aero-blade-tower dynamics and control, mooring dynamics, and platform motions. In particular, the focus of the present study is paid to the dynamic coupling between the rotor and floater and the coupled case is compared against the uncoupled case so that their dynamic coupling effects can be identified. For this purpose, a mono-column mini TLP with 1.5MW turbine for 80m water depth is selected as an example. The time histories and spectra of the FOWT motions and accelerations as well as tether top-tensions are presented for the given collinear wind-wave condition. When compared with the uncoupled analysis, both standard deviations and maximum values of the floater-responses/tower-accelerations and tether tensions are appreciably increased as a result of the rotor-floater dynamic coupling, which may influence the overall design including fatigue-life estimation especially when larger blades are to be used.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국신재생에너지학회 2006년도 추계학술대회
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• pp.301-304
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• 2006

Tower shell design is very important because tower takes about 20% of overall wind turbine cost. This paper contains procedure of tower analysis and optimization content. Some of requirements like eigenfreauency and buckling evaluated by numerical method, strength, are derived by analytic method. But strength and fatigue can be derived by mathematical method simply.

• 한국소음진동공학회논문집
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• 제21권6호
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• pp.514-520
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• 2011

Eigenvalue analysis of a wind turbine system was investigated analytically. It is derived that the equations of motion of a tower and a blade are coupled by shear forces inter-connected by boundary conditions. The eigenvalues of the coupled system was calculated using Galerkin method and it is found that the system becomes unstable when the tower and blade modes are coalesced. Further, parameter studies for the eigenvalues were performed with respect to the rotating speed of a blade, nacelle mass, blade and tower densities.

• Wind and Structures
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• 제25권6호
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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.