Sandwich towers

New Release of the dissertation of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christian Keindorf on "Structural behavior and fatigue strength of sandwich towers for wind turbines".

The capacity and size of wind turbines has increased steadily in recent years. This inevitably increases the demands on the tower constructions, which up to now have been designed as tubular steel, prestressed concrete or lattice towers. As an alternative, several variants of sandwich towers are investigated in this thesis, with which the shell stability and load-bearing capacity can be increased. A sandwich tower section basically consists of a steel inner and outer tube, which are fully stiffened by an intermediate composite material. Pumpable elastomers, epoxy resins and casting mortars can be used as composite materials, which are filled into the annular gap from the tower base in ascending order. In addition to the stiffness and compressive strength of the filling materials, their composite strength is of essential importance for the load-bearing behavior of the sandwich cross-section, which should be able to manage without additional composite materials.