A Simulation of Non-Simultaneous Ice Crushing Force for Wind Turbine Towers with Large Slopes

Li Zhou,Shifeng Ding,Ming Song,Wei Shi,Junliang Gao

doi:10.3390/en12132608

Abstract

When the offshore wind energy industry attempts to develop in cold regions, ice load becomes the main technological challenge for offshore wind turbine foundation design. Dynamic ice loads acting on wind turbine foundations should be calculated in a reasonable way. The scope of this study is to present a numerical model that considers the non-simultaneous ice crushing failure acting on the vertical structure of a wind turbine’s foundation. The local ice crushing force at the contact surface between the ice sheet and structure is calculated. The boundary of the ice sheet is updated at each time step based on the indentation length of the ice sheet according to its structure. Ice loads are validated against two model tests with three different structure models developed by other researchers. The time series of the ice forces derived from the simulation and model tests are compared. The proposed numerical model can capture the main trends of ice–wind turbine foundation interaction. The simulation results agree well with measured data from the model tests in terms of maximum ice force, which is a key factor for wind turbine design. The proposed model will be helpful for assisting the initial design of wind turbine foundations in cold regions.

Highlights

Wind energy is becoming increasingly attractive for offshore industries, since it represents a clean energy source and has few environmental effects
To extend the proposed method by Shi et al (2016), the scope of this study aims to improve the dynamic ice-structure interaction model and develop an ice load analysis program to be used for cylindrical and nearly vertical structures
The present method can generally capture the main characteristics of the ice sheet–wind turbine foundation interaction process

Summary

Introduction

Wind energy is becoming increasingly attractive for offshore industries, since it represents a clean energy source and has few environmental effects. Severe environmental conditions are the main challenge to the wide industrial application of offshore wind turbine technology, which includes the dominant effects from waves, currents, wind, and ice. The numerical modeling of wind force has been performed extensively [1,2,3]. Banerjee et al (2018) studied the dynamics of a monopile–type offshore wind turbine under combined wind and wave action [4]. Based on the offshore wind turbine’s structure, a new way to extract geothermal power using a heat exchanger was developed [5,6]. The installation and operation of the wind turbine with a control system was studied by some researchers [7,8]

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