Environmental lumping for efficient fatigue assessment of large-diameter monopile wind turbines

Abstract

Fatigue damage is one of the governing factors for the design of offshore wind turbines. However, the full fatigue assessment is a time-consuming task. During the design process, the site-specific environmental parameters are usually condensed by a lumping process to reduce the computational effort. Preservation of fatigue damage during lumping requires an accurate consideration of the met-ocean climate and the dynamic response of the structure. Two lumping methods (time-domain and frequency-domain) have been evaluated for a monopile-based 10 MW offshore wind turbine, both based on damage-equivalent contour lines. Fatigue damage from lumped load cases was compared to full long-term fatigue assessment. The lumping methods had an accuracy of 94–98% for the total long-term fatigue damage and 90% for individual wind speed classes, for aligned wind and waves. Fatigue damage was preserved with the same accuracy levels for the whole support structure. A significant reduction of computational time (93%) was achieved compared to a full long-term fatigue assessment. For the cases with 30° and 60° wind-wave misalignment, there was a mean underestimation of approximately 10%. Variations in penetration depth did not affect the selection of the lumped sea-state parameters. This work presents a straightforward method for the selection of damage-equivalent lumped load cases, which can adequately preserve long-term fatigue damage throughout the support structure, providing considerable reduction of computational effort.