The Cold-Formed Steel Research Consortium (CFSRC) provides research innovation for steel structures and this includes energy structures, such as wind turbine support towers in addition to steel buildings, racks, and related structures. Through a direct link through Director Professor Schafer, CFSRC is also able to partner with the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute (ROSEI) to amplify CFSRC’s work on these structures. Steel wind turbine support towers are slender shells that must provide structural support against a variety of dynamic loads and CFSRC’s expertise in experiments, modeling, and developing and enabling new design methods all play a critical role in increasing the efficiency and sustainability of wind turbine support towers.
In the past, CFSRC has teamed with Keystone Tower Systems (KTS) to develop a novel spirally welded tower. The work including experiments and modeling to demonstrate the structural effectiveness of this technology, which today is now delivering full-scale towers in the United States. Today, we are partnered again with KTS as well as GE Renewable Energy to investigate the potential of a multi-wrapped solution for offshore wind towers through a NOWRDC supported grant.
Currently, CFSRC through a National Science Foundation grant and in partnership with Vestas is working on improving our ability to predict and optimize the strength of traditional can-welded towers. Largely this effort hinges on the important role that imperfections play in the strength and reliability of the towers. However, this work also brought to light some interesting challenges for such towers under bending and torsion, leading to new experiments conducted by the team.
CFSRC is proud to contribute to the research in this field and its positive impact on sustainability – please contact us if you would like to learn more.