Design Challenges in International Wind Power Projects: From Foreign Codes to Computer Coding in a Small Office Setting

摘要

This paper discusses the design of steel tubular and lattice towers, which serve as the support structures for power-generating wind turbines. The towers are designed and optimized under several criteria including wind, fatigue, and seismic loading and also natural frequency criteria. This paper focuses on two primary challenges and their practical solutions. The first challenge stems from the difficulties in reconciling a UBC-compliant design with foreign building codes. As wind power continues to emerge as a viable aternate energy source, an increasing number of projects are in foreign countries. Practical solutions to dealing with foreign codes are discussed with regard to wind and fatigue design. The UBC and ASCE 7 American standards are compared to European and Canadian codes. A global economy and the Internet may lead to a time when a portion of each practitioner's everyday, real-world structural projects is in a foreign country. The second challenge is handling the large volume of design calculations involved with this kind of structure. Solutions include modern object-oriented programming in C++ to develop in-house software for tower design and optimization. Focusing on practical, easy, and useful structural design techniques, examples are presented where design efficiency has been increased beyond the limitations of computing by spreadsheets and third party commercial software. For example, one case study from actual practice shows how one week of work can now be performed in one day. Other examples demonstrate simple structural optimization techniques that avoid complex theory. Projects that involve international scope and in-house software development are usually the realm of large corporate engineering firms with much technical manpower and many budgetary resources. However, in this paper, the issues are discussed within the framework of a small design office where limited resources necessarily demand very practical solutions.