Design and fatigue analysis of monopile foundations to support the DTU 10 MW offshore wind turbine

To verify the preliminary design, FLS analyses were done using the SIMO-RIFLEX computational tool. As the water depth increases, the contribution of hydrodynamic loads to fatigue damage is found to be larger. A method for predicting total fatigue damage using fewer representative sea states was introduced: a fatigue Damage Parameter (FDP) was established to correlate fatigue damage to environmental condition by means of thrust, significant wave height (Hs) and wave peak period (Tp), and to select representative conditions. Using at least 30% of the total number of conditions resulted in at least 90% accuracy in damage prediction.