Driven by the carbon neutrality goal, wind energy, as one of the clean and renewable energy resources, has been gaining popularity worldwide. In the past several decades, many onshore and offshore wind farms have been constructed or are being planned over the world. Modern multi-megawatt wind turbine towers are designed and fabricated with taller towers, which are generally made from slender can-welded cylindrical tubes, to effectively extract wind energy and considerably lower the levelized cost of energy. Such structural systems are susceptible to complex loading resulted from combined environmental and operational conditions and particularly sensitive to geometrical imperfections that inevitably arise during the fabrication process. To date, the understanding of the fundamental structural performance of slender can-welded cylindrical tubes is limited, and the computational modelling approaches currently employed by practitioners when assessing the limit states of wind turbine support towers lack robustness and reproducibility. The proposed project will address a set of critical research questions relating to the analysis and computational modelling of wind turbine support towers, thereby facilitating more efficient and reliable design of the next generation of those towers.
The specific research objectives are to:
(1) Obtain high quality and detailed geometric imperfection data of large-scale can-welded cylindrical tubes through 3D laser scanning to underpin the development of hybrid data/physics-driven stochastic field imperfection models;
(2) Investigate the structural behaviour of large-scale can-welded cylindrical tubes under combined action of compression-bending-shear-torsion;
(3) Develop high fidelity FE models capable of capturing the buckling strength and failure mode of can-welded tubes under different loading scenarios; and
(4) Provide validated modelling protocols for advanced computational analyses.
Academic criteria: A Master's degree in relevant fields such as Structural Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Materials Engineering, or related disciplines.
Project start date: 02 October 2023.
For informal enquiries please contact Dr Xiang Yun: [Email Address Removed]
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