DYNAMIC RESPONSE ANALYSIS AND PRELIMINARY VERIFICATION OF HYBRID TEST OF WIND POWER TOWER UNDER THE COUPLING OF LONG PERIOD GROUND MOTION AND FLUCTUATING WIND

With the increasing demand of green energy, the location of wind farms has gradually developed towards to the earthquake-prone zones in China, causing wind turbines to face severe earthquake threats. Therefore, it is necessary to involve the case of coupled-earthquake-wind loads in the design of wind turbines. The horizontal-axis wind turbines with three blades are the most widely used, which are tall and flexural with a long nature period of vibration. This kind of wind turbines are more sensitive to long period earthquakes. It focus on the dynamic responses of the operating wind turbines under long period earthquakes. Taking a 1.5 MW wind turbine as the prototype, a finite element model was built in ABAQUS firstly using shell elements to simulate the seismic behavior. Then, the fluctuating wind loads were generated based on Kaimal spectrum and the dynamic response of the wind turbine is analyzed under coupled-earthquake-wind loads. Results show that the maximum displacement of tower top provided by long-period earthquakes is significantly amplified. The long-period earthquakes should be taken as one of the dominant loads for wind turbines. Finally, a software platform of hybrid simulation for wind turbines under wind-earthquake loads is developed to solve the problems of the complex loads and the small-scale specimens of wind turbines. The results provided by the numerical hybrid simulation are compared to those provide by ABAQUS model. The consistent results indicate the feasibility of the hybrid simulation.