Theoretical and experimental structural studies of historical Latin-American laminated planked timber arches

This article describes a first group of theoretical and experimental works undertaken at the Polytechnic University of Madrid. One major purpose is to obtain a structural model for the assessment of historical Latin-American vertically laminated planked timber arches built by the Spanish, mainly in the XVII and XVIII centuries. Many of those constructions still stand and represent a notable historical heritage. Pedro Hurtado recently presented his Ph. D. thesis on historical and construction topics. A structural study was then undertaken. This step of the structural research focussed on static analysis, most especially the deformation in the connection system. This article describes part of this first structural research. Even though it is still at a basic level, it shows reasonable agreement with the experimental results. Further static analytical models are been now developed and implemented. The next stage will address the dynamic problem, even though improvements will be made also in the constitutive equations.

Analysis of Renewable Energy Policies Related to Repowering the Wind Energy Sector: the Spanish Case

In countries that started early with wind energy, the old wind turbines were located in places where the wind is often very good. Since the best places in which the wind is concerned are occupied by old wind turbines (with lower capacity than the more recent ones) the trend is to start replacing old turbines with new ones. With repowering, the first generation of wind turbines can be replaced by modern multi-megawatt wind turbines. The aim of this article is to analyze energy policies in the Spanish energy sector in the repowering of wind farms from the viewpoint of the current situation of the wind energy sector. The approach presented in this article is meant to explain what have been the policies related to the repowering sector making a brief analysis of the spectrum of different stimulii that are demanded by the market analyzing also the future perspectives of the repowering sector by establishing the new opportunities based on the new published regulations.