Preparation Of The SCC Wind Turbine Tower Specimen And Tests Of Material Mechanical Properties

With the rapid growth of wind power industry, governments are seeking the solution of efficient use of wind energy with reduced costs. One of the best ways is to improve the performance of wind tower structures. It has been shown that reinforce concrete wind turbine towers have improved performance and reduced costs.On the other hand, the design of large concrete structures is based on the strength determined by lab tests of small specimens, thus the size effects of the concrete are ignored. At present, the study of size effect of ordinary concrete is quite abundant, however, the research on self-compacting concrete is still insufficient.The work in this thesis is a part of the experimental and theoretical research program of wind turbine concrete towers. By using self-compacting concrete to pour in the tower test specimen, the thesis has explored the feasibility of the use of self-compacting concrete to improve the compaction quality of the double layered reinforced thin walled hollow cylinder concrete section. The workability and mechanical properties of SCC was also tested in this research. Finally, the Brazilian splitting tests were performed to study the size effect of SCC.It was shown that the wind tower test specimen fabricated by SCC has a satisfactory quality. It is noteworthy that the flowability of SCC may be reduced rapidly as time goes on.Based on the test results, it was also found that the size effect laws of splitting tensile strength of self-compacting concrete are basically consistent with that of the ordinary concrete. The power function results based on the statistical theory of Weibull size effect which show that, with the increase in area of splitting surface, the splitting tensile strength of SCC reduces gradually until a steady value, are reflection of the size effect rules.