The TowerWingTM solution brings aeronautical knowledge regarding the wind loading of streamlined profiles to the world of tower structures. Traditionally, the tower design challenge has mostly been about the structural engineering aspects, how to make a tower just strong enough (i.e. cost effective) to provide a specified antenna surface area at the desired heights and withstand specified wind load conditions.
The TowerWingTM designers had a different approach – remove the wind load, or in practice, drastically reducing the wind drag effect on the tower and antennas.
This is made possible by enclosing the tower in a TowerWingTM streamliner with a low drag profile that rotates freely around the tower to ensure that the leading edge of the profile is always facing the wind. The full product concept is described below.
In the Aerospace and Automotive industries, aerodynamics plays a critical role in the design of vehicles and vehicle accessories. A key design objective is a shape optimised to obtain the lowest drag possible.
The drag of different shapes is commonly quantified by using a drag coefficient, denoted as cd. The drag coefficient is a dimensionless quantity denoting the drag or resistance of an object in a fluid environment such as air or water. A lower drag coefficient indicates the object will have less aerodynamic drag.
The drag coefficient cd is defined as
where:
Fd is the drag force, which is by definition the force component in the direction of the flow velocity, is the mass density of the fluid, is the flow speed of the object relative to the fluid and A is the reference area. For most objects, the reference area is the projected frontal area of the object.
Different shaped objects with the same Reynolds number and identical frontal areas can have very different drag coefficients. The adjacent diagram compares the drag coefficients of different shaped objects with identical frontal areas.
A Cube has a significantly greater drag than a Sphere. A Streamlined body has the lowest overall drag and should therefor be an ideal shape to aim for in wind load reduction applications.
By Covering A Tower With Streamlined Shape, Drag Of The Tower Is DRASTICALLY Reduced.
