Fatigue Loads on Offshore Wind Turbines Due to Weakly Non-Linear Waves

Due to the pronounced dynamic behavior of wind turbines, fatigue load effects may be quite sensitive to the precise modeling of the frequency content of the wave loading. As the offshore wind turbine technology progresses, larger and larger turbines will be placed at still deeper waters, causing the resonant frequency of the first eigen mode of a traditional bottom-fixed support structure to be typically in the range from 0.25 Hz to 0.35 Hz. The deeper the water and the larger the turbine, the lower the frequency will be. As an example, wave measurements from the offshore wind farm Bockstigen show a second peak at approximately 0.3 Hz in the wave spectrum. Thus this peak, or similar peaks realized at shallow water sites, may very well be dynamically amplified in the response. This second peak cannot be modelled with a linear wave model, and a wave model taking non-linearities into account has to be used. In the presented work, both a linear and a non-linear wave model are used to study the fatigue in an offshore wind power plant and the difference is compared. Time series of irregular linear and non-linear waves are calculated, and structural calculations of an offshore wind turbine with a slender support structure are used in the analysis of the fatigue loads. The forces on the structure are calculated using Morison’s equation, integrating along the structure and lumping the loads in nodes for the structural calculations. The difference between the wave models is significant and the non-linear model yields higher fatigue damage than the linear one.