Wind energy is a clean and renewable energy for which technology has developed rapidly in recent years. Wind turbines are commonly supported on tubular steel towers. As the turbine size is growing and the towers are rising in height, steel towers are required to be sufficiently strong and stiff, consequently leading to high construction costs. To tackle this problem, a new type of prestressed concrete tower was designed employing a novel tower concept having a regular octagon cross section with interior ribs on each side, which was optimized by comparing the natural frequency and stress difference under the same lateral load in different directions of the tower. The designed tower features a tapered profile that reduces the area subjected to wind; the tapered profile reduces the total weight, applied moment and the capital cost. An optimization method was developed employing ABAQUS software and a genetic algorithm. A target function was defined on the basis of the minimum cost of the concrete and prestressed tendon used, and constraints were applied by accounting for the stress, displacements and natural frequency of the tower. Employing the method, a 100 m prestressed concrete tower system for a 5 MW turbine was optimized and designed under wind and earthquake loads. The paper also reports a systematic design procedure incorporating the finite element method and the optimization method for the prestressed concrete wind-turbine towers.
