Open AccessSimplified fatigue load assessment in offshore wind turbine structural analysis
Author(s) -
Zwick Daniel,
Muskulus Michael
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
wind energy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 1099-1824
pISSN - 1095-4244
DOI - 10.1002/we.1831
Subject(s) - offshore wind power , turbine , structural engineering , submarine pipeline , wind engineering , time domain , marine engineering , engineering , reliability engineering , computer science , geotechnical engineering , mechanical engineering , computer vision
The estimation of fatigue lifetime for an offshore wind turbine support structure requires a large number of time‐domain simulations. It is an important question whether it is possible to reduce the number of load cases while retaining a high level of accuracy of the results. We present a novel method for simplified fatigue load assessments based on statistical regression models that estimate fatigue damage during power production. The main idea is to predict the total fatigue damage only and not also the individual damage values for each load case. We demonstrate the method for a jacket‐type support structure. Reducing the number of simulated load cases from 21 to 3, the total fatigue damage estimate exhibited a maximum error of about 6% compared with the complete assessment. As a consequence, a significant amount of simulation time can be saved, in the order of a factor of seven. This quick fatigue assessment is especially interesting in the application of structural optimization, with a large number of iterations. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.