Wind and Structures

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Evaluation of horizontal-axis-three-blade wind turbines' behavior under different tornado wind fields

  • Mohamed AbuGazia (State Key Laboratory for Disaster Mitigation in Civil Engineering, Tongji University) ;
  • Ashraf El Damatty (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Western Ontario) ;
  • Kaoshan Dai (Department of Civil Engineering, Sichuan University) ;
  • Wensheng Lu (State Key Laboratory for Disaster Mitigation in Civil Engineering, Tongji University) ;
  • Nima Ezami (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Western Ontario)
  • Received : 2023.01.19
  • Accepted : 2023.06.30
  • Published : 2023.12.25
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Abstract

Wind turbines are usually steel hollow structures that can be vulnerable to dramatic failures due to high-intensity wind (HIW) events, which are classified as a category of localized windstorms that includes tornadoes and downbursts. Analyzing Wind Turbines (WT) under tornadoes is a challenging-to-achieve task because tornadoes are much more complicated wind fields compared with the synoptic boundary layer wind fields, considering that the tornado's 3-D velocity components vary largely in space. As a result, the supporting tower of the wind turbine and the blades will experience different velocities depending on the location of the event. Wind farms also extend over a large area so that the probability of a localized windstorm event impacting one or more towers is relatively high. Therefore, the built-in-house numerical code "HIW-WT" has been developed to predict the straining actions on the blades considering the variability of the tornado's location and the blades' pitch angle. The developed HIWWT numerical model incorporates different wind fields that were generated from developed CFD models. The developed numerical model was applied on an actual wind turbine under three different tornadoes that have different tornadic structure. It is found that F2 tornado wind fields present significant hazard for the wind turbine blades and have to be taken into account if the hazardous impact of this type of unexpected load is to be avoided.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to acknowledge support from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFE0113600), National Natural Science Foundation of China (51878426 & 52278512), Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities of China, and the China Scholarship Council.

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