Tower Introduction

Wind turbines are placed on a support structure called a tower, enabling them to stand tall over surrounding structures and trees. This guarantees undisturbed wind flow and gives large blade clearance over the ground or seafloor. These support structures anchor the turbine and absorb the acting forces of gravity, wind and rotor dynamics.

Bladed provides a versatile suite of modelling options for onshore turbines:

The section about monopile towers covers the options around a simple axisymmetric model suited for onshore turbines. This tower is represented by a series of stacked beam-elements and offers different methods of description.

The section on tower aerodynamics covers the options and methods given to model forces of wind onto the tower. While, often times, less important than the forces on the rotor these play an important role in stability analysis.

Flanges and similar masses are modelled via added inertias that may be attached to the support structure. These masses represent additional material that is not already modelled by the support structure itself.