Abstract
In the current offshore wind turbine support structure design method, the tower and foundation, which form the support structure are designed separately by the turbine and foundation designer. This method yields a suboptimal design and it results in a heavy, overdesigned and expensive support structure. This paper presents an integrated multidisciplinary approach to design the tower and foundation simultaneously. Aerodynamics, hydrodynamics, structure and soil mechanics are the modeled disciplines to capture the full dynamic behavior of the foundation and tower under different environmental conditions. The objective function to be minimized is the mass of the support structure. The model includes various design constraints: local and global buckling, modal frequencies, and fatigue damage along different stations of the structure. To show the usefulness of the method, an existing SWT-3.6-107 offshore wind turbine where its tower and foundation are designed separately is used as a case study. The result of the integrated multidisciplinary design optimization shows 12.1% reduction in the mass of the support structure, while satisfying all the design constraints.
Highlights
Offshore wind energy is a growing industry, with thousands of megawatts yearly installation worldwide to enable the transition from a society dependent on fossil fuels to renewable energy
The most widely used support structure is a tubular tower that is connected through a transition piece to a monopile, and it is a suitable concept for water depths of up to 40 m [2]
Integrated design methodology This section presents different disciplines that play an important role in modeling the support structure
Summary
Offshore wind energy is a growing industry, with thousands of megawatts yearly installation worldwide to enable the transition from a society dependent on fossil fuels to renewable energy. Few sequential iterations between the wind turbine and the foundation designer are used to achieve a sound design and meet the integrated frequency-band requirement of the support structure [3] Such an isolated approach results in a suboptimal design for both the tower and foundation, and it does not offer the required cost reduction needed to make offshore wind energy competitive with traditional energy resources. Two different optimization algorithms are used to enhance the speed and convergence rate This integrated methodology is used to redesign an existing SWT-3.6-107 wind turbine support structure of a real offshore wind park where both its tower and foundation are designed separately. 2. Integrated design methodology This section presents different disciplines that play an important role in modeling the support structure.
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