A Comparison of Time Domain Seismic Analysis Methods for Offshore Wind Turbine Structures: Using a Superelement Approach

Recently, wind farm development has gained more traction in Asian countries such as Taiwan, which are seismically active. Compared to Europe, the offshore wind structures need to be designed for these additional extreme environmental conditions. For monopiles, these calculations can typically be performed in an integrated way in the wind turbine load calculation, but for jackets the superelement (SE) approach remains preferred. At the time of writing different approaches are being applied in the industry to apply the SE approach for seismic time domain analysis. This work explains and compares three different methods, based on calculations performed in offshore strength assessment tool Sesam and aeroelastic tool BHawC. When including additional interface nodes at the foundation model bottom into the SE to which the seismic accelerations can be applied in BHawC similarly as in the re-tracking run in Sesam, the results between BHawC and Sesam are nearidentical. Using a normal SE, which only includes an interface node for the connection to the wind turbine tower bottom, and including the response due to seismic displacements into the SE load file gives a match between BHawC and Sesam, and closely matches the results of the case with additional interface nodes. Doing the same but only including the dynamic response of the interface point relative to a frame of reference moving with the rigid body motions as caused by the seismic accelerations into the SE load file, significant differences occur. This is due to the lack of the loading effect of rigid body motions. The same conclusions on how these methods compare can be drawn when using different wind and wave cases. The presented results give insights into the differences between the methods and how the choice of method may influence the results.