Wind turbine tower collapse cases: a historical overview

Ma, Yanwei; Martínez-Vázquez, Pedro; Baniotopoulos, Charalampos

doi:10.1680/jstbu.17.00167

Cited by 43 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Extreme winds have been identified as the most common reason for the collapse of wind turbine towers. The tower suffers from buckling and stress concentration in areas where the thickness significantly changes [77]. Wind turbine towers are cantilever beams that lack redundancy and thus they cannot provide extensive force distribution.…”

Section: Multi-hazard Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent Advances in Vibration Control Methods for Wind Turbine Towers

2021

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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.

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Section: Multi-hazard Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent Advances in Vibration Control Methods for Wind Turbine Towers

2021

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“…These studies also analyze risks and conduct statistical analyses, but they consider only a single-type, or single-cause, category. For example, [34,35] studied historical wind tower structural failures and collapses (sourced from CWIF) to explore causes, collapse mechanisms, and techniques to mitigate such risks. The work in [36] focused on accidents related to fire based on four selected cases and examined the common causes and protection methods.…”

Section: Statistics On a Single Type Of Accident Or Single-cause Categorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The present research analyzed the factors behind deaths and injuries, similarly to [5,8,[23][24][25]28,30,31,[33][34][35] and other studies. Thus, it is related to the impact of wind turbines on public health.…”

Section: Health Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing a Decade of Wind Turbine Accident News with Topic Modeling

Ertek

Kailas

2021

Sustainability

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Despite the significance and growth of wind energy as a major source of renewable energy, research on the risks of wind turbines in the form of accidents and failures has attracted limited attention. Research that applies data analytics methodologically in this context is scarce. The research presented here, upon construction of a text corpus of 721 selected wind turbine accident and failure news reports, develops and applies a custom-developed data analytics framework that integrates tabular analysis, visualization, text mining, and machine learning. Topic modeling was applied for the first time to identify and classify recurring themes in wind turbine accident news, and association mining was applied to identify contextual terms associated with death and injury. The tabular and visual analyses relate accidents to location (offshore vs. onshore), wind turbine life cycle phases (transportation, construction, operation, and maintenance), and the incidence of death and injury. As one of the insights, more incidents were found to occur during operation and transportation. Through topic modeling, topics associated most with deaths and injuries were revealed. The results could benefit wind turbine manufacturers, service providers, energy companies, insurance companies, government bodies, non-profit organizations, researchers, and other stakeholders in the wind energy sector.

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“…More in detail, in ref. [17] a complete overview of 48 tubular wind tower collapse incidents that happened over the last 40 years is presented, discussing damage typology and causes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%