Wind farm BoP

Category: Towers & Foundations

  • Concrete towers for onshore wind farms: an overview

    Concrete towers are still an uncommon solution nowadays, basically they are still more expensive than they steel counterparts. But the trend we see in the market is toward highest tower, of 100 meters and above, while current 2MW-3MW turbines normally have an hub height around 80 meters: this can lead to situation where an hybrid…

  • Wind turbines foundation design

    Wind turbines foundation design is an art (and a job) by itself. Here you have a very quick overview of the process for shallow foundation (Patrick & Henderson foundation, widely used in the USA, follow a totally different approach) . The inputs for the foundation design are the result of the geological survey and the…

  • Anchor Cage assembly

    Here you have several picture of an anchor cage we assembled a few days ago. The anchor cage is a system conceived to transfer the loads to the foundation more effectively, anchoring the tower to the foundation. It is made of two ring-shaped steel plates, an anchor plate and a load distribution plate, secured by…

  • Anchor cage foundations

    Anchor cage foundations are an alternative to the embedded ring and they will be a de facto standard in the future. Basically an anchor cage is a set of bolts, kept together by an inferior and superior steel rings. It normally arrives disassembled to the site, and it is mounted by workers in a few…

  • Embedded Ring foundations

    Embedded ring is one of the 2 solution currently used in onshore wind farm foundations. Basically is a steel cylinder with several holes: a set of hole all around it to allow radial steel reinforcement bars to cross it and another set of holes for the passage of Medium Voltage cables and the earth copper…

  • Patrick Henderson foundation

    Patrick Henderson foundation is a technology widely used in the States, with thousands of installed foundations, but far less common in Europe. It’s a patented solution that consists of a large diameter, cast-in-place annular pier, with an average diameter of 4.5 m and a depth of about 9m, depending on the soil conditions and the…

  • Wellpoint drainage

    Wellpoint system is a solution that we used successfully in a wind farm with serious drainage problems. The soil was made of silty sands, with a very high water table level due to a river nearby. The system consists of several interconnected wells spaced along a trench. All of them are connected to a common…

  • Augercast deep foundation piles

    The following pictures are from a wind farm where due to the weak conditions of the subsoil a deep foundation with piles has been necessary, using a technique known as continuous flight augering (CFA). As you can see, with the same machine we drilled and pumped the concrete in the hole. A dry hole has…