Purpose

To increase the damping of wind turbine towers using frictional dampers and to analyze their effect on the design loads for the tower and foundation.

Description

The bending modes of tubular steel towers have low structural damping. For modern pitch-regulated turbines the longitudinal/fore-aft bending mode is highly damping by the aeroelastic coupling to the aerodynamic forces. This aerodynamic damping is close to zero for the lateral/sideways bending mode. For onshore turbines, this low damping is no problem because there is almost no excitation of this mode; however, for offshore turbines this mode may be excited by waves moving laterally to the wind direction. This load case is design giving for the tower and especially the foundation, thus if we can damp the lateral tower mode we may be able to lower the loads and use less steel and concrete.

Project form
This project will be performed in cooperation with Damptech A/S who has developed and produce frictional dampers that are used in buildings and other applications. Note that this project is a non-paid master thesis project.

Qualifications

The student must have knowledge of structural vibration analysis and programming skills

Project form

Thesis

Subjects

Computer science Engineering

Duration