Performance-based design framework for wind turbine towers to improve lifetime profitability

Wind turbine tower (WTT) is a vital part of wind energy development, which gains huge momentum globally over the past decades. In this study, an ingenious solution is provided with the proposed performance-based design framework for the WTTs. To represent the performance of the wind projects, an intuitive variable, i.e., the expected lifetime profit, is considered as the performance index. The fragility functions were used to probabilistically incorporate the uncertainties from the characteristics of natural hazards, the structural capacity estimations, the variations in geometric irregularities of towers, etc. The lifetime profit were roughly estimated based on the structural performance associated with the existing economic data collected from the current WTT projects. Furthermore, with a hypothetical case study, this paper presents a solution to improve the structural performance using the proposed methodology. The influences of the initial costs as well as the operation and maintenance costs on the profit were also investigated. The final profit and the profit-operating time curves were provided, which are valuable references to the designers, the owners and the insurers of the wind farm projects.