Abstract
The offshore wind market is developing towards exploiting wind resources in deeper water sites. Inevitably, this fuels new research and feasibility studies on alternative solutions for the wind turbine support structures. Within this context, this work aims at comparing three different support structure design concepts for a 14 MW two-bladed downwind wind turbine: an XXL monopile, a hybrid jacket-tower and a lattice tower. To ensure a fair comparability of the three design concepts, a load capacity analysis is first performed to assess the yield strength of each concept and guarantee a similar material utilization. The comparative analysis is then carried out in terms of total mass, dynamic behaviour of the interaction between rotor and support structure, soil-structure interaction and resulting hydrodynamic forces. Based on the given design constraints, the preliminary results of this study favour a lattice tower solution. The study also highlights peculiar dynamic phenomena such as veering, mode hybridization and mode coalescence for the dynamic interaction between the lattice tower and the two-bladed rotor which need to be taken into account during the design phase.
Highlights
The increasing size of wind turbines and the need to start exploiting wind resources in deeper water sites are introducing new challenges for the offshore wind industry
The results show that the jacket and the lattice tower allow for a significant mass reduction
The comparative analysis of the three design concepts shows that for the space-frame structures a significant reduction of the total mass can be achieved during a preliminary design stage
Summary
The increasing size of wind turbines and the need to start exploiting wind resources in deeper water sites are introducing new challenges for the offshore wind industry. Researchers are focused on the study of the so-called XXL monopile support structures which introduce significant problems in terms of manufacturing, installation and sensitiveness towards soilstructure interaction [1, 2]. An alternative solution is represented by the hybrid jackettower concept, consisting of a space-frame substructure supporting a tubular tower. A first advantage of a space-frame structure relies on the slenderness of its foundation piles, whose corresponding soil-structure interaction is relatively easier to handle compared to the soilmonopile interaction [3]. The aforementioned result can be challenged by considering a full-height lattice concept which provides a larger margin of optimizing its configuration in order to achieve an even larger weight reduction [6, 7]
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