The strain history affecting the fatigue life of fixed offshore support structures is one of the most important topics in structural monitoring. However, some critical fatigue locations are located below the seabed, and the installation of strain gauges at these locations entails significant maintenance costs. In contrast, acceleration which reflects the vibration characteristics of the structure is an easily accessible and more stable physical parameter. Therefore, this study presents a strain estimation scheme that uses limited acceleration measurements to estimate the dynamic strain field of the fixed offshore support structures. An adaptive displacement reconstruction method is used to obtain the displacements at the master degrees of freedom, then the global displacements are obtained by the evolutionary orthogonal response expansion method, and finally, these displacements are implemented into the numerical software by redefining the boundary conditions to obtain the dynamic strain field. The advantage of the proposed method over the traditional strain-solving forward problem is that it relies solely on measured acceleration and structural geometry information, without requiring displacement, strain, or modal information. The correctness of the proposed method is verified by a numerical jacket platform model with multi-harmonic and non-stationary random excitations. Furthermore, physical experiments under eccentric rotation and hammering excitations are performed to assess the applicability of the proposed method on a wind turbine model equipped with laser displacement and fibre bragg grating sensors as reference measurements. The results show that the proposed method can accurately predict the dynamic strains of jacket platform and wind turbine support structures, while the appropriate agreement between the estimated strains and the numerical results, and the optical measured response is observed, with maximum estimation errors of 1.80% and 4.63%, respectively. Summarily, the application of the approach enables a new type of strain monitoring applicable to fixed offshore support structures.
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