Fibre composite wind mill structure - investigations and design considerations

Abstract

During the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the University of Southern Queensland, an artistic concept was put to merge the Australian tradition of using windmills with the advanced usage of composite materials. With the main structural system based on fibre composite sandwich construction, its behavioural issues and failure modes are presented. The FE modelling considerations for this type of structure is presented. Limited experimental program was conducted to investigate the behaviour of sandwich panel under compression and verify the test results with the FE analysis approach. To assess the suitability of the connection between the fibre composite tower and the footing, prototype brackets that comprised from all-composite infill and steel plate infill were tested under tension to assess their load carrying capacity. This experiment showed that using all-composite brackets achieved higher capacity when compared to composite skins filled with steel plate. The paper concludes with general discussion of using composites for the main structural elements.