Category: Towers & Foundations
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BoltShield® anchor bolts rust protector cap
Some weeks ago I’ve been contacted by a company developing an interesting product – a tailor made protector cap for anchor bolts. I’ve notices that in some wind farms corrosion of the exposed side of the anchor bolt can be a problem. For instance, it’s not unusual to observe this phenomenon in areas with high…
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Wind turbine foundations cracks – an update
I already discussed in another post a frequent problem of with turbines foundation, the appearance of cracks. In general, my impression is that the new foundations with anchor cages are much more reliable that the previous technical solution (the “embedded ring” – the industry standard some years ago). However, every now and then I still…
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Piled foundation for wind turbines
I’ve noticed last week that the blog has no post on piled foundation and decided to write a couple of words on the topic on a flight back to Hamburg. Piled foundations is a broad term that include several technical solution aimed at increasing the bearing capacity of the soil when design requirements such as…
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Nabrawind Technologies self erecting tower
Some years ago I posted an article about a self-lifting wind turbine tower. The idea was to use using heavy lift strand jacks already available in the market to lift the concrete sections of a wind turbine tower. It’s a project developed by Esteyco, a Spanish engineering company. Well, I just discovered that it’s not…
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Dynamic loads on wind turbines
I discussed in another post the relevance of resonance analysis in the design of steel tower for wind turbines and the different technical solutions currently in the market. But what are the loads that could induce resonance in the wind turbine? There are several different type of dynamic loads: Unbalanced rotor. This basically means that…
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Type of towers – stiff, soft or soft soft?
In the last month I spent a lot of time discussing about “soft soft” towers. But what does it exactly means? Steel tower for wind turbine are classified as stiff, soft, or soft soft based on the relative natural frequencies of tower, rotor and blades. You obviously want to avoid that your tower is excited…
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WTG tower – concrete or steel?
One of the key decision in a wind farm is the type of tower that will be used to reach the desired hub high. In the infancy of the wind industry, lattice towers where used – you can still see them in very old wind farm, for instance in southern Spain. However, this technology was…
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Self lifting precast wind towers
A couple of months ago I’ve been invited by Esteyco to the erection of a prototype auto lifting precast wind tower. Although I was unable to attend due to other meetings I want to describe shortly their invention, which looks interesting. Basically, the idea is to create a tower that can “lift itself” without the…
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Geotechnical parameters for WTG foundations design
This is the first post after a long silence (more than 6 months), fortunately due to good news (the birth of my first son, who reduced dramatically my free time). I want to thank José Ramon, one of our experienced Project Manager, who pushed me to start again 😉 This post is about geotechnical parameters…
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Wind Turbines Precast Foundations
I’ve recently discovered the existence of precast foundation for wind turbines. Strangely enough, this solution isn’t having a big success, at least as far as I know. By the way, there are several clear advantages: first of all, an important time saving. According to the developer brochure, only 2 days are needed to complete the…