Wind power is a substantial resource to assist global efforts on the decarbonization of energy. The drive to increase capacity has led to ever-increasing blade tip heights and lightweight, slender towers. These structures are subject to a variety of environmental loads that give rise to vibrations with potentially catastrophic consequences, making the mitigation of the tower’s structural vibrations an important factor for low maintenance requirements and reduced damage risk. Recent advances in the most important vibration control methods for wind turbine towers are presented in this paper, exploring the impact of the installation environment harshness on the performance of state-of-the-art devices. An overview of the typical structural characteristics of a modern wind turbine tower is followed by a discussion of typical damages and their link to known collapse cases. Furthermore, the vibration properties of towers in harsh multi-hazard environments are presented and the typical design options are discussed. A comprehensive review of the most promising passive, active, and semi-active vibration control methods is conducted, focusing on recent advances around novel concepts and analyses of their performance under multiple environmental loads, including wind, waves, currents, and seismic excitations. The review highlights the benefits of installing structural systems in reducing the vibrational load of towers and therefore increasing their structural reliability and resilience to extreme events. It is also found that the stochastic nature of the typical tower loads remains a key issue for the design and the performance of the state-of-the-art vibration control methods.
The present paper focuses on the enhancement of the development of small wind energy considering sustainable energy harvesting criteria. As known, the exploitation of wind energy as an environmental friendly energy source is carried out by wind turbine systems. In order to satisfy local energy needs, low power small scale wind turbines could be used. Their use, contributes to the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions in the local atmosphere, as well as to the consumption of electricity on site where power is produced. In the present work a comparative analysis has been performed taking into consideration two different application sites located in Crete Island, Greece. This analysis is based on actual recordings of the characteristics of the wind and followed by the selection of the optimum installation height, as well as the estimation of the construction cost. This analysis includes two different design cases using two different construction materials for the support tower, in particular steel and aluminium, taking into account the results of the respective advanced finite element analysis models. This way the proposed analysis leads to an enhanced evaluation of the sustainability of the small wind energy systems in the local built environment.
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