Wind towers - design of flange ring connection

Abstract

Today, wind power is second largest available renewable resource of energy, with 870 TW (terawatts). Large wind farms, with hundreds of wind towers are big opportunity for steel production industry. Designers and manufacturers of wind towers pay special attention on every single detail, always looking for some new solutions, trying to reduce price of wind towers. Some of the most interesting design and manufacturing details are connections used to assemble sections of tubular steel towers supporting wind turbins. There is traditional and actually more used flange ring connection and on the other side, as a new proposal which is used more and more, friction connection. In this paper theoretic basis of design of flange ring connection of wind towers is given