Fatigue Damage on Offshore Wind Turbines by a Cell Mapping Method

Abstract

Due to large variability of the offshore environment, the load analysis of an offshore wind turbine is a complex task. It is normally performed in the time domain, by running stochastic simulations. This is usually very time consuming due to the necessity of having long time series in order to obtain results with little bias, or to sample events with a low probability of happening. An alternative is to perform the analysis in the frequency domain. The drawback is that this method is only valid for linear systems, which makes it rather inaccurate for fatigue damage results. Also, there are well-known inaccuracies when estimating fatigue damage from a response spectrum. This paper investigates a novel approach based on probability evolution methods, which can obtain accurate results for linear, as well as non-linear systems. The method is not very well known, and a drawback is that it can be numerically challenging, especially for high-dimensional problems. The benefits of the method are that it evaluates all possible states of the wind turbine without generating a long signal in the time domain. We show how this can be used to efficiently evaluate fatigue damage.