Mo Li, Yun-Chen Wu, Gabriel Falzone, Jason Cotrell
Abstract
The efficiency and energy generating capacity of wind turbines increases as they become larger and are installed on taller towers. For example, an ultra-tall 140-meter tower can increase energy production by more than 21 percent compared to a typical 80-meter-tall tower. Building ultra-tall wind turbine towers would enable California to retrofit old wind farms and develop new wind farms that cost effectively capture greater amounts of wind energy. Conventional towers are made from steel in manufacturing plants in the central United States or imported internationally and transported to the wind plant by truck or rail. Existing tower sections needed to support ultra-tall towers (140-meter) are too wide and too tall to be manufactured and transported over roads.
To address this challenge, RCAM Technologies and the University of California, Irvine, developed, demonstrated, and tested a 3D concrete printing technology for building low-cost, ultra-tall wind turbine towers on site at the wind plant. The team completed a preliminary structural design of ultra-tall wind turbine towers made from 3D printed concrete. The team procured and operationalized a 3D concrete printing system to fabricate a concrete tower subassembly in a laboratory. These efforts demonstrated the feasibility of the 3D concrete printing manufacturing process for segmental tower construction on site. Detailed structural testing of the tower subassembly indicated that the 3D concrete printed tower specimen performed beyond the expected levels, validating the design method and manufacturing process.
The team also performed techno-economic and market analyses and planned future development activities, indicating that the technology is expected to be cost competitive in the next five years. Commercialization of this technology will help California meet the goal of powering all retail electricity sold in the state and state agency electricity needs with renewable resources by 2045, as set forth in Senate Bill 100.