Wind turbines and seismic hazard: a state-of-the-art review

Abstract

Wind energy is a rapidly growing field of renewable energy and as such, intensive scientific and societal interest has been already attracted. Research on wind turbine structures has been mostly focused on the structural analysis, design and/or assessment of wind turbines mainly against normal (environmental) exposures while, so far, only marginal attention has been spent on considering extreme natural hazards that threat the reliability of the lifetime-oriented wind turbine's performance. Especially, recent installations of numerous wind turbines in earthquake prone areas worldwide (e.g., China, USA, India, Southern Europe and East Asia) highlight the necessity for thorough consideration of the seismic implications on these energy harnessing systems. Along these lines, this state-of-the-art paper presents a comparative survey of the published research relevant to the seismic analysis, design and assessment of wind turbines. Based on numerical simulation, either deterministic or probabilistic approaches are reviewed, since they have been adopted to investigate the sensitivity of wind turbines' structural capacity and reliability in earthquake-induced loading. The relevance of seismic hazard for wind turbines is further enlightened by available experimental studies, being also comprehensively reported through this paper. The main contribution of the study presented herein is to identify the key factors for wind turbines' seismic performance while important milestones for ongoing and future advancement are emphasized.

Shaking table test on vibration control effects of a monopile offshore wind turbine with a tuned mass damper

“…In the last decades, with the pressing need for clean, renewable, and sustainable energy, intensive attention has been paid to wind energy harvesting. As wind power generation is regarded as an environment‐friendly way to transform wind energy into electric energy, an extensive number of wind turbine towers, including onshore ones and offshore ones, have been installed worldwide, and many of them are located in seismic active areas . Offshore wind turbine towers are preferable than onshore wind turbine towers, because the former one can produce more electric energy, with less adverse influence on the environment on which human rely for living.…”

Seismic Fragility Analysis of Monopile Offshore Wind Turbines under Different Operational Conditions

“…It is well understood that earthquake motions in the continental shelf from the coastal land to offshore undersea do great harm to the safety of offshore wind turbines in areas of active seismicity [2,3]. Since earthquakes are unpredictable, offshore wind turbines can be operating under different operation conditions when an earthquake occurs [4,5], resulting in different combinations of seismic load and environmental wind and wave loads acting on the wind turbine supporting structures. These combinations of loads cause different nonlinear dynamic responses for offshore wind turbines, which may exceed limit states of the structure and cause failure in both the power generation system and the supporting foundations.…”

“…Many attempts to study the seismic dynamic responses [6][7][8][9], structural safety [4,5,[10][11][12] and analytical methods [4,13] of wind turbines have been conducted. Most studies focused on onshore wind turbines, which are shorter in the cantilever length than their offshore counterparts.…”

Seismic analysis of a tall metal wind turbine support tower with realistic geometric imperfections

“…A complete recent literature review of the topic by Katsanos et al . concluded that the effects of near‐fault records on wind turbines require further investigation.…”