A robust methodology for predicting extreme structural responses of offshore wind turbines

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a robust methodology for predicting extreme structural responses of offshore wind turbines. This robust methodology starts with forecasting an improved IFORM (Inverse-First-Order Reliability Method) environmental contour line through the use of principal component analysis. It then performs stochastic time domain simulations of an offshore wind turbine based on the information of the highest sea state identified along the aforementioned environmental contour line. Next, an enhanced Peaks-Over-Threshold (POT) method is utilised for fitting an extreme value distribution based on which a long-term extreme structural response can finally be obtained. A specific example of predicting the 50-year extreme structural responses of a monopile-supported 5MW offshore wind turbine will be provided in this paper for demonstrating the robustness of our proposed methodology.