Vorspannung bei Onshore-Windenergieanlagen - Vom Neubau bis zur Instandsetzung bestehender Anlagen

Post-Tensioning for Onshore-Wind Energy Plants - From New Construction to retrofitting of existing structures

With increasing importance of wind power and development of stronger turbines higher towers for wind energy are required. Related to this, changes in the design of the towers are necessary. Depending on the used tower type foundations are designed differently. While in a steel tower steel parts or bolts are cast in the concrete, prestressed solutions can be used for the concrete-concrete connection in post-tensioned concrete and hybrid towers. While a few years ago in Germany only bonded tendons were used for post-tensioned towers, further developments have globally led to stressing concepts using external tendons in post-tensioned concrete and hybrid towers. Although the basic layout of the tendons may be similar to tendons used in bridge construction, the applicability of the different boundary conditions in the wind-tower has to be verified.
With the multitude of running plants it cannot completely be prevented that failures during execution or factors not considered during design makes it necessary to strengthen existing towers. In this article, retrofitting of a foundation is described in which due to originally lower concrete strength by the confinement of the foundation an actively triaxial stress state is generated by tendons, which increases the vertical compressive strength of the foundation.