Seismic Performance Analysis and Safety Assessment of Wind Turbine Tower System

Abstract

The seismic safety and serviceability of main wind turbine tower system structures after an earthquake is important to the seismic reliability of the whole wind engineering. This study proposed a performance-based seismic design methodology for wind towers system based on the incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) by finite element method, which taken into account the interaction of the tower system with the soil ground. An IDA-based seismic assessment method including fractile and fragility analyses for a 1.5MW wind turbine tower system case was developed. Then, the occurrence and development of the concrete foundation cracks, failure modes and mechanisms were investigated according to a series of nonlinear numerical simulation tests.