Special features in the design of concrete wind towers

Abstract

In this article, the specific features of the structural design of support structures for Wind Energy Converters (WEC) are described. For this, special attention is paid to the critical design issues, which are, in most cases, new in the civil engineering field. The text is specially focused in the hybrid prefabricated concrete-steel tipology, illustrating the exposition with several pictures of the Hamina Wind Park, Finland, where the authors designed four 3 MW WEC's with 100.0 meters hub height. These towers are satisfactory running since September 2010.