Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
266061 Engineering Structures 2015 11 Pages PDF
Abstract

•A fatigue damage assessment of a fixed offshore wind turbine support structure is performed.•The operational mode of the wind turbine 3 loading conditions are identified.•For each loading condition 4 critical regions located in different zones of the supporting structure are studied.•The stress transfer function is obtained by carrying out dynamic finite element analysis.•An up-to-date rainflow cycle counting method is adopted to count the total number of cycles.

The objective of this work is to carry out a fatigue damage assessment of a fixed offshore wind turbine support structure due to combined wave and wind – induced loading. Considering the operational mode of the wind turbine 3 loading conditions are identified and for each loading condition 4 critical regions located in different zones of the supporting structure are studied. The stress transfer function is obtained by carrying out dynamic finite element analysis in the frequency domain. A wave scatter diagram of the North Atlantic is used in order to account for the environmental effects. The stress transfer function is formulated such that a sufficient number of frequencies can be used in the Inverse Fast Fourier Transform with random phase angles in order to obtain the stress time histories. An up-to-date rainflow cycle counting method is adopted to count the total number of cycles related to stress range bins. The S–N approach is employed to estimate fatigue damage.

Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Earth and Planetary Sciences Geotechnical Engineering and Engineering Geology
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