Session: 09-01-16 Wind Energy: Structures 1

Paper Number: 122023

122023 - A Flexible Support System for Large Wind Turbine 

The current trend of increasing capacity for offshore wind turbine demands larger and larger foundation but conventional foundation design technology can bring high cost and can be constrained by fabrication/installation capacity.  This paper presents a new intelligent support system  for future large turbine. Instead of designing stronger and stronger foundation thus higher and higher CAPEX, the root cause of the design issues, i.e., the large turbine load, has been re-examined and optimsed. Accordingly, the design approach has been changed to one that reduces turbine loads through an intelligent support system. This new design re-shapes the tower section for aerodynamic efficiency, enable self alignment with wind by offsetting rotational certer to wind pressure center, and enact a soft/ passively reactive base so the load transfer from tower is minismised.  These features not only simplify the design of the turbine system and improve energy efficiency, reduces the tower weight but  most importantly it reduce loads to the substructure leading to considerable reduction of  CAPEX. SInce there is no yaw system at the tuop of the tower,  the OPEX cost of wind farm development can also be reduced greatly.  The design is suitable for both fixed and floating, new large turbie or repurpose old turbine. 

Presenting Author: Wangwen Zhao Wang Hai Limited

Presenting Author Biography: Wangwen is offshore wind engineering director for AtkinsRealis and Director for Wang Hai limited. He has over 32 years experiences in the offshore industry after gaining his PhD on structural reliability of Fatigue and Fracture under Random Loading at Imperial College, London. He is a chartered engineer. His experiences span from creating cutting edge technology in fatigue analysis to inventing new foundation forms, from conducting research on new material, devising to risk based inspection scheme, from designing offshore wind foundations to providing technical authorities in offshore operations. He has held senior management positions in the last 15 years as chief engineer or technical directors in the offshore wind industry with companies such as Worley, ODE, Mott MacDonald, and AtkinsRealis.

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