Digital twining of an offshore wind turbine on a monopile using reduced-order modelling approach

Abstract

In the wind energy industry, a cost-benefit digital twin (DT) will be very useful for managing the operation of a wind turbine. For instance, a DT could provide information on structural health conditions in real-time as well as projections for the near future. In this work, we employ a component-based Reduced-Order Modelling (ROM) technique to construct a DT of a parameter-varying offshore wind turbine system on a monopile. The DT consists of a ROM model for modal analysis and structural response prediction under wind and wave loadings. First, an offline library is pre-computed, which contains a series of component archetypes. Then, the component-based ROM is assembled out of these archetypes, such as the parts in the blade, hub, nacelle, and tower. With the computation speed of two orders (approximately 650x) faster than a Finite Element Analysis (FEA) model and high accuracy (less than 0.2% error), the DT could be able to provide almost instant predictions of the modes and the responses of the turbine structure due to the wind-wave loading as well as projections of structural health conditions.