Integrated design optimization of spar floating wind turbines

A linearized aero-hydro-servo-elastic floating wind turbine model is presented and used to perform integrated design optimization of the platform, tower, mooring system, and blade-pitch controller for a 10 MW spar floating wind turbine. Optimal design solutions are found using gradient-based optimization with analytic derivatives, considering both fatigue and extreme response constraints, where the objective function is a weighted combination of system cost and power quality. Optimization results show that local minima exist both in the soft-stiff and stiff-stiff range for the first tower bending mode and that a stiff-stiff tower design is needed to reach a solution that satisfies the fatigue constraints. The optimized platform has a relatively small diameter in the wave zone to limit the wave loads on the structure and an hourglass shape far below the waterline. The shape increases the restoring moment and natural frequency in pitch, which leads to improved behaviour in the low-frequency range. The importance of integrated optimization is shown in the solutions for the tower and blade-pitch control system, which are clearly affected by the simultaneous design of the platform. State-of-the-art nonlinear time-domain analyses show that the linearized model is conservative in general, but reasonably accurate in capturing trends, suggesting that the presented methodology is suitable for preliminary integrated design calculations.     

Modified environmental contour method for predicting long-term extreme responses of bottom-fixed offshore wind turbines

Predicting extreme responses is very important in designing a bottom-fixed offshore wind turbines. The commonly used method that account for the variability of the response and the environmental conditions is the full long-term analysis (FLTA), which is accurate but time consuming. It is a direct integration of all the probability distribution of short-term extremes and the environmental conditions. Since the long-term extreme responses are usually governed by very few important environmental conditions, the long-term analysis can be greatly simplified if such conditions are identified. For offshore structures, one simplified method is the environmental contour method (ECM), which uses the short-term extreme probability distribution of important environmental conditions selected on the contour surface with the relevant return periods. However, because of the inherent difference of offshore wind turbines and ordinary offshore structures, especially their non-monotonic behavior of the responses under wind loads, ECM cannot be directly applied because the environmental condition it selects is not close to the actual most important one.The paper presents a modified environmental contour method (MECM) for bottom-fixed offshore wind turbine applications. It can identify the most important environmental condition that governs the long-term extreme. The method is tested on the NREL 5 MW wind turbine supported by a simplified jacket-type support structure. Compared to the results of FLTA, MECM yields accurate results and is shown to be an efficient and reliable method for the prediction of the extreme responses of bottom-fixed offshore wind turbines.     

Time domain analysis procedures for fatigue assessment of a semi-submersible wind turbine

Long term time domain analysis of the nominal stress for fatigue assessment of the tower and platform members of a three-column semi-submersible was performed by fully coupled time domain analyses in Simo-Riflex-AeroDyn. By combining the nominal stress ranges with stress concentration factors, hot spot stresses for fatigue damage calculation can be obtained. The aim of the study was to investigate the necessary simulation duration, number of random realisations and bin sizes for the discretisation of the joint wind and wave distribution. A total of 2316 3-h time domain simulations, were performed.In mild sea states with wind speeds between 7 and 9 m/s, the tower and pontoon experienced high fatigue damage due to resonance in the first bending frequency of the tower from the tower wake blade passing frequency (3P).Important fatigue effects seemed to be captured by 1 h simulations, and the sensitivity to number of random realisations was low when running simulations of more than 1 h. Fatigue damage for the tower base converged faster with simulation duration and number of random realisations than it did for the platform members.Bin sizes of 2 m/s for wind, 1 s for wave periods and 1 m for wave heights seemed to give acceptable estimates of total fatigue damage. It is, however, important that wind speeds that give coinciding 3P and tower resonance are included and that wave periods that give the largest pitch motion are included in the analysis.     

The wet-towing resistance of the composite bucket foundation for offshore wind turbines

The composite bucket foundation (CBF) is a new and environmentally-friendly foundation for offshore wind turbines. This foundation can be prefabricated in batches onshore followed by integrated transport and installation at sea. The structure itself has a subdivision air cushion structure that enables the foundation to float stably on the water surface and realize long-distance towing of the foundation. The mechanism of this air-liquid-solid coupling towing process is complicated, and the influence of the bulkheads on the towing resistance is not clear. In this paper, the influence of the subdivision structure on the towing resistance of the CBF is compared with the tow test in hydrostatic water. The structural motion characteristics and the change of the cushion pressure are also analysed. Experiments are used to verify numerical calculation results. The flow field difference between the CBF with bulkheads, the CBF without bulkheads and the real floating structure was analysed. The dynamic pressure coefficient was used to analyze the force at surfaces of different CBF's. For the tow test and numerical calculation of multiple CBFs, the optimal multi-CBF tow distance and towage number are obtained through the calculation of energy consumption rate.     

Support condition monitoring of monopile-supported offshore wind turbines in layered soil based on model updating

Monopile-supported offshore wind turbines (OWTs) are dynamically sensitive structures whose fundamental frequencies may be close to those of environmental and turbine-related excitations. The changes in fundamental frequencies caused by pile-soil interaction (PSI) may result in unwanted resonance and serious O&M (Operation and Maintenance) issues, which have been identified as major challenges in the research field. Therefore, a novel model updating framework with an implicit objective function is proposed to monitor both the stiffness and damping variation of the OWT system based on the measured vibration characteristics, which is further verified by laboratory tests. In particular, layered soil was considered in the tests to simulate the practical soil conditions of Chinese seas. Different pile lengths were introduced to consider the long-term PSI effects for rigid piles and slender piles. The results showed that the variation in the fundamental frequency is significantly reduced in layered soil compared with the pure sand scenario. For the OWT systems in layered soil, the variation in foundation stiffness is negatively related to the burial depth under cyclic loading. The proposed model updating framework is proven reliable for support condition monitoring of OWT systems in complicated soil conditions.     

Strain estimation for offshore wind turbines with jacket substructures using dual-band modal expansion

Structural fatigue is a design driver for offshore wind turbines (OWT). In particular, the substructures, like jackets, are strongly affected by fatigue. Monitoring the fatigue progression in the welds is vital for the maintenance and a potential lifetime extension. However, inspections of critical locations are costly due to the limited accessibility of the mostly submerged jacket. Considering the high number of potentially critical welds, it is regarded as economically unfeasible to equip all fatigue hot spots with sensors. Thus, an indirect method to monitor the fatigue progress of the structure and point out critical locations is desirable. For a consistent support of ongoing maintenance, it has to yield reliable results for varying operational and environmental conditions. This paper applies a virtual sensing approach to jacket substructures. From a small set of sensors on the tower, fatigue at every desired location of the jacket is estimated using dual-band modal expansion. Simulations using the OC4 jacket design are performed to show potentials and limitations of the method. Namely fatigue progress on leg welds of K-joints is predicted with high accuracy over a wide range of load cases. However, some difficulties in fatigue prediction of X-joints due to the occurrence of local modes and limitations in the extrapolation of wave loading have to be resolved in future work.     

Calibration of safety factors for offshore wind turbine support structures using fully coupled simulations

The offshore wind industry experienced a boost during the last decade in terms of size of wind farms and rated capacity of the wind turbines: towers are getting taller and blades are getting longer, constantly facing new and complex challenges. Because of the relative immaturity of the wind industry, and the fact that the offshore design standards stemmed from the oil and gas industry, it is generally acknowledged that the reliability levels achieved, although not very well understood, might result in partial safety factors not optimal for OWT. This paper addresses this situation by studying the reliability levels delivered by the current standards and assessing the validity of the safety factors through a reliability-based code calibration. The combination of the low probability of failure imposed on the design of OWTs and the computational cost of the aero-elastic time-domain simulations brings out the need to develop new approaches for reliability analyses. In this paper, the reliability analysis is performed using a Kriging surrogate model to approximate the load-effect from the aero-elastic simulations converting expensive-to-evaluate limit state functions to explicit functions. Subsequently, a calibration of the safety factors is carried out using the probabilistic models from literature. The approach is applied to an industry-reference turbine and support structure. The results showed very low probabilities of failure for the most severe design cases and confirm that the safety factors from the IEC are mostly adequate.     

Static and dynamic loading behavior of a hybrid foundation for offshore wind turbines

Considering the deficiencies of the traditional monopile foundation for offshore wind turbines (OWTs) in severe marine environments, an innovative hybrid foundation is developed in the present study. The hybrid foundation consists of a traditional monopile and a wide–shallow bucket. A series of numerical analyses are conducted to investigate its behavior under the static and dynamic loading, considering various loading eccentricities. A traditional monopile with the same steel volume is used as a benchmark. Although the monopile outperforms the hybrid foundation in terms of the ultimate moment capacity under each loading eccentricity, the latter can achieve superior or the same performance with nearly half of the pile length in the design loading range. Moreover, the horizontal load and moment are mainly resisted by the bucket and the single pile in the hybrid foundation respectively. The failure mechanism of both the hybrid foundation and the monopile is excessive rotation. In the rotation angle of 0.05 rad, the rotation center is located at the depth of approximately 0.6–0.75 times and 0.65–0.75 times the pile length for the hybrid foundation and the monopile respectively. The increasing loading eccentricities can lead to increasing moment bearing capacity, increasing initial stiffness and upward movement of the rotation center of the two foundations, while decreasing load sharing ratio of the single pile in the hybrid foundation. Three scenarios are considered in investigating the dynamic loading behavior of the hybrid foundation. Dynamic response results reveal that addition of the bucket to the foundation can restrain the rotation and lateral displacement effectively. The superiority of the hybrid foundation is more obvious under the combined wave and current loading.     

Research on the calculation method of penetration resistance of bucket foundation for offshore wind turbines

The cost of foundations for offshore wind turbines constitutes approximately 35% of the total cost of an offshore wind farm. The bucket foundations show significant potential due to their superior transportation and installation efficiencies compared to pile foundations, leading to potential cost savings for the foundation of up to 30%. For a bucket foundation to be installed successfully, the penetration resistance must be predicted. However, there is currently a lack of clarity on how to select a suitable calculation method for penetration resistance based on known geological parameters to guide construction. In order to evaluate the current methods of calculation for bucket foundation penetration resistance, this study combines theoretical calculation methods with two sets of practical measurement data from the field. The calculation methods of penetration resistance for bucket foundation are first reviewed and categorized. The applicability range of each method and the parameters needed for calculation are given. Next, according to the measured data in the process of penetration of bucket foundation on site, the evolution of compartment pressure, tilt angle, resistance and required suction in the process of penetration are analyzed. Finally, the reviewed methods are compared to the results of two practical projects in order to analyze the differences between them and make recommendations for the calculation technique. The findings can be used as a guide for calculating the bucket foundation's penetration resistance in complex geological conditions.     

A procedure for predicting the permanent rotation of monopiles in sand supporting offshore wind turbines

Foundations for Offshore Wind Turbines (OWTs) are designed following the limit state philosophy. One of the considered states is the Serviceability Limit State (SLS), which verifies that the permanent rotation of the foundation generated from accumulated strains in the soil is below a project specific criterion. Despite design codes requiring an estimation of the permanent rotation, there is not clear guidance on how to implement this. This paper describes a methodology to estimate the monopile permanent rotation for SLS and discusses its advantages and limitations. The methodology combines an accumulation method with results from 3D Finite Element Analyses (FEA) and a soil model that accounts for strain accumulation as a function of the number of cycles, relative density and load characteristics. The performance of the proposed methodology is compared against experimental centrifuge tests and results from advanced 3D FEA, indicating that it can predict the permanent rotation with satisfactory accuracy, and with a considerable reduction in computational effort. This is important for the design of OWTs, where different load histories might be required to be checked – often under tight time constraints – to find which load history leads to the largest permanent rotation, and therefore is more critical to SLS design.     

An object-oriented method for fully coupled analysis of floating offshore wind turbines through mapping of aerodynamic coefficients

This work presents a novel object-oriented approach to model the fully-coupled dynamic response of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs). The key features offered by the method are the following: 1) its structure naturally allows for easy implementation of arbitrary platform geometries and platform/rotor configurations, 2) the analysis time is significantly faster than that of standard codes and results are accurate in situations where rotor dynamic contribution is negligible, and 3) an extremely flexible modeling environment is offered by the object-oriented nature of Modelica. Moreover, the current modeling facility used for the code development is open source and is naturally suitable for code sharing. In the present method, the aerodynamic model computes the aerodynamic loads through the mapping of steady-state aerodynamic coefficients. This modeling approach can be placed at the intersection between simplified aerodynamic methods, such as TDHMill, and full beam element/momentum-based aerodynamic methods. Aerodynamic loads obtained from the coefficients mapping are composed of a concentrated thrust and a concentrated torque. The thrust acts at the hub, while the torque is applied at the rotor low-speed shaft of a simplified rigid rotor equation of motion (EoM) used to emulate the rotor response. The aerodynamic coefficients are computed in FAST for a baseline 5 MW wind turbine. A standard rotor-collective blade-pitch control model is implemented. The system is assumed to be rigid. Linear hydrodynamics is employed to compute hydrodynamic loads. The industry-standard numerical-panel code Sesam-Wadam (DNV-GL) is used to preprocess the frequency-domain hydrodynamic problem. Validation of the code considers a standard spar-buoy platform, based on the Offshore Code Comparison Collaboration (OC3-Hywind). The dynamic response is tested in terms of free-decay response, Response Amplitude Operator (RAO), and the time histories and power spectral densities (PSDs) of several load cases including irregular waves and turbulent wind. The resulting model is benchmarked against well-known code-to-code comparisons and a good agreement is obtained.     

Design optimization of a TetraSpar-type floater and tower for the IEA Wind 15 MW reference wind turbine

We present an optimization study for the conceptual design of wind turbine floaters of the TetraSpar type. The optimization variables include all geometric dimensions of the floater, keel, mooring lines and tower design. A gradient based optimization method is applied to a mass proportional objective cost function. The objective function accounts for the different weight components of the floater, including secondary steel, the wind turbine tower, and the mooring system. A frequency domain response method is utilized, so that each design evaluation also takes into account the dynamic response for 12 wind speeds with associated wave conditions. Nineteen constraints are applied for static and dynamic response, natural frequencies, and fatigue at the bottom of the tower. Two reference designs are presented, namely one with a soft–stiff tower and one with a stiff–stiff tower. Due to the anti-phase coupling of the floater pitch and tower vibration, the soft–stiff tower needs a stronger floater stiffness in pitch. This design thus has a larger water plane area moment than the more compact stiff–stiff floater, which is found to be the least economical. A constraint analysis is next presented based on Lagrange multipliers and a relative cost index. We find that the strongest cost influence is exerted by the 3P tower frequency constraint for the stiff-stiff and soft-stiff designs. Finally, a third design variant with a free optimizable tower frequency is introduced. This design is found to be 11% cheaper than the soft–stiff design and highlights the potential cost savings of tower designs within the 3P region.     

Parametric method for the assessment of fatigue damage for marine shaft lines

An original parametric method is introduced for the assessment of the fatigue life of marine shaft lines. The particularity of the method lies in the fact it introduces a relevant load modelling around a limited number of parameters specific to marine shaft lines while depicting the loading complexity (multiaxiality, mean stress effect, non-proportionality of the loading path). The method is designed to allow for assessments, in both in-use and pre-design phase shafts, towards a particular fatigue damage mode. The observations made in this study show two damage modes. On one hand, a damage mode issued from multiaxial cycles and associated with ship maneuvers, corresponding to HCF regime. On the other hand, there is a damage mode in the VHCF regime resulting from bending stress cycles due to the structure rotary bending.