Concrete Could Make Wind Towers Taller

By David Hill

The precast elements would be stacked on-site and used to construct towers as tall as 140 m. Sri Sratharan, Ph.D.,
M.ASCE, Iowa State University

A new design using precast-concrete elements assembled on-site could enable wind turbine towers to reach
the heights at which the wind blows strongest.

October 28, 2014A new design for wind turbine towers could result in more efficient turbines and taller towers that
are built as components and transported at less expense, according to researchers at Iowa State University. The
researchers recently received a $1-million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop a tower that is
built from a combination of high-strength concrete (HSC) and ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) rather than
steel, which is more commonly used.

Cylindrical steel towers have long been the industry standard for utility-scale turbines, most measuring roughly 80 m
tall. Stronger and steadier winds often exist at greater heights, but transporting and erecting steel towers that are tall
enough to reach them can often prove prohibitively expensive, says Sri Sritharan, Ph.D., M.ASCE, the Grace Miller
Wilson and T.A. Wilson Endowed Engineering Professor of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at
Iowa State University.

Sritharan is leading a project that would use precast concrete panels and columns to construct wind turbine towers as
tall as 140 m in an effort to increase the efficiency of wind farms and enable them to be built in regions where
sufficient winds are available only at such lofty heights. He says that the towers would expand the reach of wind
energy infrastructure and could be easily transported and constructed using existing technology and the current labor
pool.
This is a revolutionary idea, Sritharan says. These towers would be easy to transport and build, and would allow
the turbines to operate in more favorable wind conditions by going taller.
Sritharans design uses concrete columns and rectangular panels to construct a six-sided towera technology called
Hexcrete. The UHPC and SHC panels are attached between the six columns, each of which has a hexagonal shape.

Sritharan used the technology last year to design a 100 m tall concrete tower as part of a project conducted with
Grant Schmitz, A.M.ASCE, a former graduate research assistant at Iowa State. The two tested tower segments and
connections and found that the technology could handle the required loads. Sritharan will now design towers of 120
m and 140 m heights and test their critical components.

The research will be funded by the 18-month grant from the DOE as well as by an $83,500 grant from the Iowa
Energy Center and a $22,500 contribution from the Calgary, Alberta-based construction firm Lafarge North America,
Inc. Research partners in the project are Siemens Corporations Corporate Technology Research Center in
Princeton, New Jersey; Coreslab Structures (OMAHA), Inc., a precast concrete plant in Bellevue, Nebraska; and the
Federal Way, Washington-based structural engineering firm BergerABAM.

The concrete design enables taller towers to be built simply by stacking transportable columns and panels on-site
rather than by increasing the size of the prefabricated pieces, as is required with steel. Most 80 m tall tubular steel
towers are built with a 14 ft wide base, and building a 100 m tower would require a thicker steel shell and an 18 ft
wide base, says Sritharan.
While this would increase the towers height by 25 percent, he notes that it would nearly double the volume of steel
required, and would make the base section of the tower too wide to transport as a single piece. Using multiple pieces
to form a base section in the field would add to the time and cost already associated with steel, which must be
transported, in some cases, from overseas.
If you have a curved, circular shell
thats 50 meters long, the transportation
is going to get cumbersome regardless
of the construction material, he says.
The Hexcrete option uses flat panels.
You just stack them on top of each
other, and the columns are long, narrow
pieces, so they are easier to transport.

The concrete panels would be cast as

thin as 3 in. thick and yet could support
towers of 120 m and 140 m that
generate 2.3 to 3 MW of electricity.
Connecting the panels to the columns
using bolts, posttensioning, or UHPC
have all been shown to be viable
methods, Sritharan says.
The six-sided towers would be made of precast concrete columns
The researchers will partner with
and panels that could be easily transported.
Siemens to complete the taller tower
Sri Sratharan, Ph.D., M.ASCE, Iowa State University
design and optimization, while
BergerABAM will help to develop a plan
for erecting the towers and will calculate the cost of energy generated in comparison to that of turbines with steel
towers. Coreslab Structures (OMAHA), Inc., will produce all of the concrete components needed for the tests and will
construct the towers.

Sritharan says that his technology could have a vast economic impact by reducing transportation costs, increasing
demand for a local workforce and locally produced materials, and creating taller wind turbines that can take
advantage of stronger winds at higher altitudes. He says that the technology would increase the efficiency of turbines
in Iowa and on the Great Plains, where wind energy is thriving, and would also enable turbines to be built for the first
time near the east and west coasts, where sufficient winds have long been considered out of reach for standard
turbine towers.

You wouldnt have to transport the energy from the Midwest to the east and west, and thats what the current
challenge is, he says. We are staying competitive with steel and getting more flexible in terms of tower design and
its transportation.

David Hill is the senior writer for Civil Engineering magazine