Abstract
Design lifetime of a wind turbine is required to be at least 20 years. The most important step to ensure the deign is to evaluate the loads on the wind turbine as accurately as possible. In this study, extreme design load of a offshore wind turbine using Garrad Hassan (GH) Bladed and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) FAST codes are calculated considering structural dynamic loads. These wind turbine aeroelastic analysis codes are high efficiency for the rapid numerical analysis scheme. But, these codes are mainly based on the mathematical and semi-empirical theories such as unsteady blade element momentum (UBEM) theory, generalized dynamic wake (GDW), dynamic inflow model, dynamic stall model, and tower influence model. Thus, advanced CFD-dynamic coupling method is also applied to conduct cross verification with FAST and GH Bladed codes. If the unsteady characteristics of wind condition are strong, such as extreme design wind condition, it is possible to occur the error in analysis results. The NREL 5 MW offshore wind turbine model as a benchmark case is practically considered for the comparison of calculated designed loads. Computational analyses for typical design load conditions such as normal turbulence model (NTM), normal wind profile (NWP), extreme operation gust (EOG), and extreme direction change (EDC) have been conducted and those results are quantitatively compared with each other. It is importantly shown that there are somewhat differences as maximum amount of 18% among numerical tools depending on the design load cases.
