Thanks to the excellent research of TW Group members such as Ph.D. Candidate Victoria Ding, Visiting Faculty Scholars Dr. Sandor Ádány, Dr. Xiang Yun, and Dr. Sheng Jin, post-doctoral scholar Dr. Astrid Winther Fischer and MS Candidate Xi Peng as well as all of our internal and external collaborators a great deal of excellent work was completed in 2022 related to wind tower support structures.
In the lab we completed our testing on scale model tower tube sections in bending and torsion, and reported out the findings at conferences in the Fall and Winter of 2022: (a) Ding, V., Yun, X., Schafer, B.W., Torabian, S. (2022). “Experimental Tests on Stability of Cylindrical Shells Under Combined Bending and Torsion.” Proceedings of the Cold-Formed Steel Research Consortium (CFSRC) Colloquium. October 2022. https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/67712 and (b) Ding, V., Torabian, S., Lin D., Yun X., Shields M., Myers A., Schafer, B.W. (2022). “Lab Scale Tests on Cylindrical Shells Under Combined Bending and Torsion for Wind Turbine Towers.” Proceedings of ASME 2022 International Offshore Wind Technical Conference IOWTC2022 December 7-8, 2022, Boston, Massachusetts.
Computationally we made great progress on bringing the convenience of tools like CUFSM to wind tower engineers, through development of efficient elastic buckling algorithms that will be further improved and released to engineers as open source code in 2023. Here’s one of the papers: Adany, S., Schafer, B.W., (2022). “An efficient numerical method for linear buckling analysis of tubular members.” North American Wind Energy Association (NAWEA) / WindTech 2022, 20-22 September 2022, Newark, Delaware.
The team continues to work on improving the engineering design and efficiency of wind tower support structures. We have active projects on imperfection sensitivity and robust design, development of multi-wrapped spirally-wrapped towers, reliability of offshore wind towers in hurricanes, and more. The team is looking forward to an incredibly productive 2023 and doing its part to help bring sustainable energy to the world.