An Australian engineering firm has come up with a way to install wind turbine towers that would use 30 per cent less concrete, slash on-site concrete pours by 70 per cent and shave construction time by around 20 weeks – it just needs a developer game enough to give it a first go.
The innovation is a precast wind turbine foundation base that icubed consulting, an engineering firm, is hoping can replace at least some of the wind turbine foundations predominantly used in Australia at the moment, known mass gravity footing.
Rohan McElroy, icubed consulting’s principal structural engineer, says that with the advent of bigger and bigger wind turbines, these solid concrete footings are becoming enormous, requiring upwards of 700 cubic meters of concrete to be poured on around 80 to 100 tonnes of reinforcing steel.
The “exciting innovation project” icubed consulting has been working on for the past two years instead uses between 25 to 30 concrete blocks, or ribs, that are precast in a factory and then transported to site and craned into position – complete with reinforcing and anchor cage bolts.
McElroy says the product has been 100% designed in Australia with the icubed team – which has underpinned around 8 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity of traditional turbine foundations around the country – in conjunction with Humes Holcim Australia, a specialist in precast concrete.
