Workshop on Structural Safety and
Infrastructure Management
Lloyd’s Register, London, 24th May 2017
Reliability of offshore wind turbine towers based on Kriging surrogate
models 1
R. Teixeira *,A. O’Connor and M. Nogal
1TrinityCollege Dublin, School of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering
*rteixeir@tcd.ie
Introduction
The Offshore Wind Turbine (OWT) sector has been growing steadily in parallel
with the current needs and demands for clean energy. Still, the cost of OWT
energy is still above other energy conversion sources.
Despite being a highly technical sector, improvement of the design techniques
remains a need to unlock new breakthroughs that will enable it to become
progressively more competitive.
The analysis of OWT is a complex process that involves many variables. A sample
of some of the relevant variables that generate uncertainty in the design and
operation of OWTs are presented in the next figure. Showing therefore the high
complexity comprised by OWTs.
One of the areas of particular concern for OWT, as designed for a long life-time,
is the fatigue design. In the case of the OWT towers, fatigue is seen as a major
driver of failure.
Fatigue Analysis of OWT
The design of OWT stands to two major standards, the IEC61400-1 and
IEC61400-3. Other standards, guidelines and recommendations can be found
that comply with the previously mentioned and that were created to help the
designer during design and certification processes.
The current fatigue design of OWT involves the following steps:
Its long term character demands that a significant computational effort is
needed in the process of designing an OWT (thousands of simulations that may
take an average of 10~20 minutes time to run). This makes the design of the
tower resource consuming on a practical basis; and almost unfeasible on a
probabilistic optimization framework. Naturally, this fact foments the
development of new methodologies to assess in a probabilistic way the OWT
tower fatigue.
The TRUSS project has received funding from the European Union’s
Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie
Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 642453
1 1
Using a response Kriging model for reliability purposes
A Kriging surrogate model is a generic description that includes different types of
models. These can be usually described as a model of a model. They can be also
understood as a mathematical relation or an algorithm that relates the inputs
and the outputs of a certain system or process.
Mathematically they are better understood as:
𝐺 𝑥 = 𝑓 𝛽; 𝑥 + 𝑧 𝑥 ,
where 𝑓 𝛽; 𝑥 is a deterministic component determined by a regression model
defined by 𝑝 basis functions 𝑓𝑝 𝑥 and 𝛽𝑝 regression coefficients. The Gaussian
stochastic uncertainty of the model is introduced by 𝑧(𝑥), which is a stochastic
Gaussian process with mean 0 and covariance between any two points space.
The Kriging is then capable of interpolating a curve and considering potential
deviations of it. In practice the Kriging surface shows the potential to replace the
computationally expensive code or approximate functions difficult to compute.
The one dimensional model of the short term damage DSH function of the wind
(U) is presented as:
The Kriging considers potential inaccuracies in the fitted function (black line) and
admits that its deviations can be enclosed within a Normal distribution (e.g.
95% interval given by the grey area).
Every extracted sample represents the damage generated in the tower for a
specified period of time of operation of the OWT, considering thus the
uncertainty associated with, in the case, the 10 minutes output.
Calculating the probability of failing
With this approach it is possible to replace the computer expensive simulation
(on the left) and define the life-time distribution by simulating multiple OWT
tower life (on the right). Consequently settling its probability of failure.
Main conclusions and next steps
Significant computational effort can be cut by using a Kriging surface approach to
calculate the fatigue of OWT. Still, major challenges need to be tackled. Major
example is the need to find a strategy to approach ideally the variability of the
short-term damage (DSH) generated by the wind. These limitations are being
tackled by TRUSS and the framework proposed for it.
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