New Forging Method for the Door Frame of Wind Turbine Tower

This research introduces an advanced forging method to produce the door frame of the wind turbine tower. The advantage of the new forging method is the increase of raw material utilization ratio and the energy saving. In the conventional method, the door frame is hot forged with a hydraulic press and machined out lots of material because of the big difference between forging shape and final machined shape. But the proposed forging method is composed of forging and rolling process to get near shaped forgings to machined product. The ring rolled blank size is predicted based on the neutral line constancy of the ring and final forgings. On the decision of the ring rolled blank dimension, repeated finite element analyses were applied to increase the material utilization ratio. The new forging method enables raw material to be reduced 28% and heat cost to be cut down 6%. Keywords—Cost saving, Door Frame, Finite element analysis, Forging method, Wind turbine tower