Nonlinear Buckling Analysis of Wind Turbine Towers

Abstract

Wind turbine towers are belonging to towering cylinder shell structures, which are easy to appear buckling instability under wind or other complicated loads, and on which integral elastic-plastic buckling analyses have great theoretical and practical significances. This paper used large deflection nonlinear pre-buckling and Koiter initial post-buckling theories, and adopted the finite element scheme of updated integration algorithm and LDC nonlinear solution method, then analyzed the linear buckling, elastic-plastic static buckling, and post-buckling response of the towers with initial imperfections in different location and size. It has obtained that: 1) the critical load of towers with elastic-plastic buckling is much smaller than it with elastic buckling; 2) gravity has certain influence on the critical buckling load; 3) the critical buckling load is insensitive to initial imperfections, meanwhile the imperfections which located on the top or the bottom of the tower are inferior for the stability of tower.