• International Journal of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.9-20
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• 2018

Due to integrated stochastic wind and wave loads, the supporting platform of a Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) has to bear six Degrees of Freedom (DOF) motion, which makes the random cyclic loads acting on the structural components, for instance the tower base, more complicated than those on bottom-fixed or land-based wind turbines. These cyclic loads may cause unexpected fatigue damages on a FOWT. This paper presents a study on short-term fatigue damage at the tower base of a 5 MW FOWT with a spar-type platform. Fully coupled time-domain simulations code FAST is used and realistic environment conditions are considered to obtain the loads and structural stresses at the tower base. Then the cumulative fatigue damage is calculated based on rainflow counting method and Miner's rule. Moreover, the effects of the simulation length, the wind-wave misalignment, the wind-only condition and the wave-only condition on the fatigue damage are investigated. It is found that the wind and wave induced loads affect the tower base's axial stress separately and in a decoupled way, and the wave-induced fatigue damage is greater than that induced by the wind loads. Under the environment conditions with rated wind speed, the tower base experiences the highest fatigue damage when the joint probability of the wind and wave is included in the calculation. Moreover, it is also found that 1 h simulation length is sufficient to give an appropriate fatigue damage estimated life for FOWT.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.53-65
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• 2019

Misaligned wind-wave and seismic loading render offshore wind turbines suffering from excessive bi-directional vibration. However, most of existing research in this field focused on unidirectional vibration mitigation, which is insufficient for research and real application. Based on the authors' previous work (Sun and Jahangiri 2018), the present study uses a three dimensional pendulum tuned mass damper (3d-PTMD) to mitigate the nacelle structural response in the fore-aft and side-side directions under wind, wave and near-fault ground motions. An analytical model of the offshore wind turbine coupled with the 3d-PTMD is established wherein the interaction between the blades and the tower is modelled. Aerodynamic loading is computed using the Blade Element Momentum (BEM) method where the Prandtl's tip loss factor and the Glauert correction are considered. Wave loading is computed using Morison equation in collaboration with the strip theory. Performance of the 3d-PTMD is examined on a National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) monopile 5 MW baseline wind turbine under misaligned wind-wave and near-fault ground motions. The robustness of the mitigation performance of the 3d-PTMD under system variations is studied. Dual linear TMDs are used for comparison. Research results show that the 3d-PTMD responds more rapidly and provides better mitigation of the bi-directional response caused by misaligned wind, wave and near-fault ground motions. Under system variations, the 3d-PTMD is found to be more robust than the dual linear TMDs to overcome the detuning effect. Moreover, the 3d-PTMD with a mass ratio of 2% can mitigate the short-term fatigue damage of the offshore wind turbine tower by up to 90%.