The research of the affecting factors on the seismic response of wind turbine tower

In this paper, using finite element method, a FEM model of wind turbine towers with the consideration of soil-structure interaction using spring-damping element was proposed to investigate their dynamic response to multi-dimension seismic excitation in time domain. The updated Lagrange FEM formalism has been adapted to discrete the equation and use Newmark integral method to solve it step by step. Though numeral analyzing to study the influence of several factors on structure's dynamic property, such as P-Δ effect, soil-structure interaction (SSI),the vertical seismic action, the rotating rotor, and so on. The results show that the SSI effects not only decrease the natural frequencies but also influence the time domain seismic response of the wind turbine tower significantly, and then draw a conclusion that the SSI cannot be allowed to be ignored. In line elastic range, the influence of vertical seismic excitation and the p-Δ effect are not notable. Otherwise, there are a lot of effects of rotating rotor on the seismic response of the wind turbine tower.