Abstract
The extremely changing nature of the wind action generates fatigue effects on wind sensitive structures, such as Wind Turbines (WT). Here, the wind-induced response over time of a WT tower located in Oaxaca, Mexico, is calculated considering fatigue damage. The analyses consider three main stages: time cero (at the moment of the tower installation, considering no damage), service time, considering different levels of damage at the tower’s base (corresponding to 20, 24, 30, 40 and 43 years), and time near the collapse limit state of the tower (about 47 years). In order to characterize these effects, a methodology that uses an ARMA model to simulate time-series of turbulent wind speed, and a non-lineal fatigue damage model is proposed. The structural capacity of the tower is obtained over time and details about the impact of wind-induced fatigue on the capacity of the WT are highlighted.
Highlights
According to the Global Wind Energy Council, in the last decades, the use of wind power has globally increased
Numerical methods such as the Blade Element Momentum (BEM) [6], Vorticity models [7, 8] or Computational Fluid Dynamics [9, 10] allow to simulate the wind field and obtain the wind forces that act on the blades
The main aim is of this study is to analyze the structural capacity of a Wind Turbines (WT) tower over time, considering fatigue effects at the tower’s base, taking into account different damage levels over the tower life cycle from the moment of its installation
Summary
According to the Global Wind Energy Council, in the last decades, the use of wind power has globally increased. In Wind Engineering, numerical and statistics methods have been applied to simulate wind speeds for a certain time horizon, for example: wavelet superposition, Artificial Neural Networks, hybrid methods, and time-series approach such as the Auto-Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) model [3,4,5]. The interaction of the wind with the blades generates important aerodynamic effects that impact on the structural capacity. Numerical methods such as the Blade Element Momentum (BEM) [6], Vorticity models [7, 8] or Computational Fluid Dynamics [9, 10] allow to simulate the wind field and obtain the wind forces that act on the blades
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