Robust Requirements and Design Optimization for Offshore Wind Turbine Structure Utilizing Approximate Model Technology

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 146-152
Author(s):  
Hezhen Yang ◽  
Yun Zhu
Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 3526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jieyan Chen ◽  
Chengxi Li

The increased interest in renewable wind energy has stimulated many offshore wind turbine concepts. This paper presents a design optimization and a coupled dynamics analysis of a platform with a single tether anchored to the seabed supported for a 5 MW baseline wind turbine. The design is based on a concept named SWAY. We conduct a parametric optimization process that accounts for important design considerations in the static and dynamic view, such as the stability, natural frequency, performance requirements, and cost feasibility. Through these optimization processes, we obtain and present the optimized model. We then establish the fully coupled aero-hydro-servo-elastic model by the time-domain simulation tool FAST (Fatigue, Aerodynamics, Structures, and Turbulence) with the hydrodynamic coefficients from an indoor program HydroGen. We conduct extensive time-domain simulations with various wind and wave conditions to explore the effects of wind speed and wave significant height on the dynamic performance of the optimized SWAY model in various water depths. The swivel connection between the platform and tether is the most special design for the SWAY model. Thus, we compare the performance of models with different tether connection designs, based on the platform motions, nacelle velocity, nacelle accelerations, resonant behaviors, and the damping of the coupled systems. The results of these comparisons demonstrate the advantage of the optimized SWAY model with the swivel connection. From these analyses, we prove that the optimized SWAY model is a good candidate for deep water deployment.


2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 218-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ji-Hyun Lee ◽  
Soo-Young Kim ◽  
Myung-Hyun Kim ◽  
Sung-Chul Shin ◽  
Yeon-Seung Lee

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 805-818 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Einar S. Stieng ◽  
Michael Muskulus

Abstract. The large amount of computational effort required for a full fatigue assessment of offshore wind turbine support structures under operational conditions can make these analyses prohibitive, especially for applications like design optimization, for which the analysis would have to be repeated for each iteration of the process. To combat this issue, we present a simple procedure for reducing the number of load cases required for an accurate fatigue assessment. After training on one full fatigue analysis of a base design, the method can be applied to establish a deterministic, reduced sampling set to be used for a family of related designs. The method is based on sorting the load cases by their severity, measured as the product of fatigue damage and probability of occurrence, and then calculating the relative error resulting from using only the most severe load cases to estimate the total fatigue damage. By assuming this error to be approximately constant, one can then estimate the fatigue damage of other designs using just these load cases. The method yields a maximum error of about 6 % when using around 30 load cases (out of 3647) and, for most cases, errors of less than 1 %–2 % can be expected for sample sizes in the range 15–60. One of the main points in favor of the method is its simplicity when compared to more advanced sampling-based approaches. Though there are possibilities for further improvements, the presented version of the method can be used without further modifications and is especially useful for design optimization and preliminary design. We end the paper by noting some possibilities for future work that extend or improve upon the method.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Einar S. Stieng ◽  
Michael Muskulus

Abstract. The need for cost effective support structure designs for offshore wind turbines has led to continued interest in the development of design optimization methods. So far, almost no studies have considered the effect of uncertainty, and hence probabilistic constraints, on the support structure design optimization problem. In this work, we present a general methodology that implements recent developments in gradient-based design optimization, in particular the use of analytical gradients, within the context of reliability-based design optimization methods. By an assumed factorization of the uncertain response into a design-independent, probabilistic part and a design-dependent, but completely deterministic part, it is possible to computationally decouple the reliability analysis from the design optimization. Furthermore, this decoupling makes no further assumption about the functional nature of the stochastic response, meaning that high fidelity surrogate modeling through Gaussian process regression of the probabilistic part can be performed while using analytical gradient-based methods for the design optimization. We apply this methodology to several different cases based around a uniform cantilever beam and the OC3 Monopile and different loading and constraints scenarios. The results demonstrate the viability of the approach in terms of obtaining reliable, optimal support structure designs and furthermore show that in practice only a limited amount of additional computational effort is required compared to deterministic design optimization. While there are some limitations in the applied cases, and some further refinement might be necessary for applications to high fidelity design scenarios, the demonstrated capabilities of the proposed methodology show that efficient reliability-based optimization for offshore wind turbine support structures is feasible.


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