MeTuSA research project

Project title: MeTuSA – Methods for the simulation of vortex-excited tower vibrations and for the site-specific design of tall wind turbine towers

Summary:

The increasing size of wind turbines also increases the flexibility of components and the risk of aeroelastic instabilities. In particular, vortex-induced vibrations (ViV) of the tower in the structure of the system should be mentioned here. With this instability, a resonance between the tower’s natural frequency and the cyclically separating, transient vortex paths in the tower wake leads to a critical upswing. This can lead to structural damage to the wind turbine as well as to stress for the installation and maintenance personnel. Since there are no suitable calculation methods for site-specific simulation of this effect in the literature or in science, a new semi-empirical method is being developed in the MeTuSA project that enables the integration of tower vibrations in transient load simulations. In addition, the influences of site-specific meteorological conditions and countermeasures are being investigated in the project.

In addition to the development of the semi-empirical model, the sub-project of the University of Oldenburg contributes to this project primarily with wind tunnel experiments to form the database for modeling and to validate the simulations. For this purpose, the available wind tunnel and an active grid for the individual design of the user-defined inflow are used to investigate simplified tower models in various flow situations such as turbulence intensities and shear.