Dimension Optimization for a Prestressed Concrete-Steel Hybrid Wind Turbine Tower with Particle Swarm Approach

Abstract

It is hard to develop wind farms in mountain areas when traditional conical steel towers are used. Prestressed concrete-steel hybrid (PCSH) tower has advantages and is an alternative for wind turbine due to weak requirement in transportation. In this paper, an optimization approach for PCSH wind turbine tower using particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach is proposed and employed to find an optimal design for a 2MW wind turbine with a height of 77.5m.The physical dimensions of the PCSH tower are adopted as variables and the total cost is treated as the optimal object function. Compared with that of the original design using traditional conical steel towers, the cost of the PCSH tower is reduced significantly by the use of the PSO algorithm.