Liftra designed a "climbing crane" to install wind turbines faster by attaching to the tower and climbing as it is assembled. Finite element analysis with Ansys Cloud and Mechanical showed the crane would not deform the tower during installation. Simulations of the full assembly on Ansys Cloud were 5 times faster than on workstations, allowing a safer, optimized design.
Liftra designed a "climbing crane" to install wind turbines faster by attaching to the tower and climbing as it is assembled. Finite element analysis with Ansys Cloud and Mechanical showed the crane would not deform the tower during installation. Simulations of the full assembly on Ansys Cloud were 5 times faster than on workstations, allowing a safer, optimized design.
Liftra designed a "climbing crane" to install wind turbines faster by attaching to the tower and climbing as it is assembled. Finite element analysis with Ansys Cloud and Mechanical showed the crane would not deform the tower during installation. Simulations of the full assembly on Ansys Cloud were 5 times faster than on workstations, allowing a safer, optimized design.
Liftra designed a "climbing crane" to install wind turbines faster by attaching to the tower and climbing as it is assembled. Finite element analysis with Ansys Cloud and Mechanical showed the crane would not deform the tower during installation. Simulations of the full assembly on Ansys Cloud were 5 times faster than on workstations, allowing a safer, optimized design.
Ansys + Liftra “Thanks to Ansys Cloud we can solve more complex models faster than ever. Delivering on time is very important, but delivering an improved, safer, optimized design is even better. Thanks to Ansys Cloud we can achieve more complex designs and simulate more complete models up to 5 times faster.” Miguel Hoffmann Senior Engineer Specialist / Liftra CASE STUDY
Liftra Designs ‘Climbing Crane’ for Wind Turbine Installation
5X faster Using Ansys Cloud and Ansys Mechanical
Liftra has revolutionized the installation of wind turbines by creating the LT1500 crane that “climbs” the wind turbine tower as it is being assembled instead of sitting beside it. The bottom of the crane grabs onto a flange of one tower section and lifts the next section into place. Then, a “hoist block” travels up and attaches to the higher section and pulls the crane up the tower to attach to the higher flange. In a sequence of such grabbing and hoisting moves, an entire wind turbine, including the tower, nacelle, rotor, and blades, can be constructed. With 50 engineers working primarily in Spain and Denmark, Liftra is developing this crane for wind turbine OEMs and also for end users of wind turbines to maintain wind farms.
/ Challenges Traditional cranes are large and expensive, requiring a fleet of trucks to move the crane to the site and between installation areas on a wind farm. In designing a smaller “climbing” crane that would take up less ground space and require just one truck to move to the next installation site, Liftra engineers needed to be able to ensure that the tower elements would not be crushed by the applied climbing forces, including the load on the tower and flanges, and the gripping forces.
/ Ansys Solutions Used
• Ansys Cloud • Ansys Mechanical Figure 1. Example of design where Liftra use simulation for validation. / Engineering Solution Liftra engineers ran finite element structural simulations both in Ansys Cloud and on their own workstations to perform static simulations of the loads involved when a crane is attached to and climbs up the long tower of a wind turbine as it is being assembled. They ran both linear material models and nonlinear material models for elastic/plastic analysis of the towers to determine whether the crane would cause any permanent deformation to the tower, and, if so, how much. The linear material model was run in Ansys Cloud on an HC Virtual Machine of Microsoft Azure featuring 44 Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 processor cores. This model includes 1.8 million nodes with many nonlinear contacts (more than 100 frictional contacts). Using Ansys Cloud, the simulation was completed in 1 hour versus 5 hours on company workstations — a speed-up of 5X. Figure 2. Design validated thanks to Simulation on Ansys Mechanical. / Benefits • Finite element simulations confirmed that the LT1500 crane climbing the tower would not cause any deformation of the wind turbine tower. “Previously we were forced to do • Being able to set up these large models to run as a single simulation on Ansys more simplification and isolate parts Cloud made for a better and safer design. Instead of splitting the analysis up into to perform calculations on each multiple simulations and calculating the interface forces, Liftra engineers were separate part; now we can simulate able to do everything in the same simulation. the global assembly.” • The best simulation setup was a combination of Ansys Cloud, Ansys Elastic Miguel Hoffmann Licensing and Liftra’s own licenses. With design offices in Spain and in Denmark, Senior Engineer Specialist / Liftra it’s very useful to be able to borrow licenses and avoid waiting until someone finishes a simulation before starting something new.
Ansys + Liftra // 2 • A cost analysis revealed many barriers to Liftra maintaining its own on-premises cluster. These included maintenance costs, paying employees to manage the cluster, and the need for extra licenses. Using Ansys Cloud is less expensive while delivering higher computing power; they can run many parallel jobs with almost unlimited power.
/ Company Description Liftra is recognized by the international wind turbine industry as a professional specialist in lifting and transportation solutions. We guarantee excellent engineering services in this field, and all projects developed in cooperation with Liftra take into account the practical context for their application. Starting out in 2003, Liftra has undergone rapid growth as a contributor and trusted partner in the wind turbine industry. Today, we have locations in Denmark, the USA, Spain, China and Poland.
Figure 3. Pictures showing the final product that Liftra commercialized for wind turbine customers.
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