Joint Probability Distribution of Environmental Conditions for Design of Offshore Wind Turbines

Abstract

The design process for offshore wind turbines includes a fatigue life evaluation of the structure with the relevant environmental conditions at the specified wind farm location. Such analyses require long-term distributions of the environmental parameters including their correlation. In general, the significant wave height, wave peak period and mean wind speed are the most important parameters for describing offshore environmental conditions. However, due to the low side-to-side damping level of offshore bottom-fixed wind turbines, wave directions misaligned with the wind direction may excite low-damped vibrational modes. As a consequence, the accumulated fatigue damage in the wind turbine foundation may change, compared to collinear wind and waves. In the current work, an extension to the three-parameter environmental joint probability distribution is presented, with the resulting distribution being a function of the significant wave height, peak period of the total sea, mean wind speed and the wave directional offset compared to the mean wind heading i.e. the wind-wave misalignment. The sea states within a 1-year return period for Dogger Bank are presented, as well as the 10- and 50-year environmental contour lines and extreme wind-wave misalignment angles.