Comparative structural analysis of lattice hybrid and tubular wind turbine towers

This paper presents a comparative structural analysis of lattice hybrid tower with six legs with conventional tubular steel tower for an onshore wind turbine using finite element method. Usually a lattice hybrid tower will have a conventional industry standard 'L' profile section for the lattice construction with four legs. In this work, the researcher attempted to identify and analyze the strength of six legged lattice hybrid tower designed with a special profile instead of four legged L profile. And to compare the structural benefits of special star profile with the conventional tubular tower. Using Ansys, a commercial FEM software, both static and dynamic structural analyses were performed A simplified finite element model that represents the wind turbine tower was created using Shell elements. An ultimate load condition was applied to check the stress level of the tower in the static analysis. For the dynamic analysis, the frequency extraction was performed in order to obtain the natural frequencies of the tower.