Physical Modelling of Offshore Wind Turbine Foundations for TRL (Technology Readiness Level) Studies

Journal of Marine Science and Engineering

Sondipon Adhikari¹  Nicholas Alexander²  Abdullahi Aliyu³  Subhamoy Bhattacharya³  Liang Cui³  Sadra Amani³  Muhammad Aleem³  Jorge Mendoza³  Ying Wang³  Domenico Lombardi⁴  Vikram Pakrashi⁵  Saleh Jalbi⁶  Ganga Prakhya⁷  Wei Li⁸  Nathan Vimalan⁹ 

[1] College of Engineering, Swansea University, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK;Department of Civil Engineering, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1TH, UK;Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, UK;Department of Mechanical, Aerospace & Civil Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK;School of Mechanical and Material Engineering, University College Dublin, 100125 Dublin 4, Ireland;Sea and Land Projects Engineering, London SE1 1UN, UK;Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd., Hemel Hempstead HP2 7TR, UK;Tokyo Electric Power Services Corporation Co Ltd., Tokyo 1350062, Japan;V J Tech, Reading RG2 0TB, UK;

关键词: TRL (Technology Readiness Level);    offshore wind turbines;    scaling laws;    monopile;    proof of concept;   

DOI  :  10.3390/jmse9060589

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Offshore wind turbines are a complex, dynamically sensitive structure due to their irregular mass and stiffness distribution, and complexity of the loading conditions they need to withstand. There are other challenges in particular locations such as typhoons, hurricanes, earthquakes, sea-bed currents, and tsunami. Because offshore wind turbines have stringent Serviceability Limit State (SLS) requirements and need to be installed in variable and often complex ground conditions, their foundation design is challenging. Foundation design must be robust due to the enormous cost of retrofitting in a challenging environment should any problem occur during the design lifetime. Traditionally, engineers use conventional types of foundation systems, such as shallow gravity-based foundations (GBF), suction caissons, or slender piles or monopiles, based on prior experience with designing such foundations for the oil and gas industry. For offshore wind turbines, however, new types of foundations are being considered for which neither prior experience nor guidelines exist. One of the major challenges is to develop a method to de-risk the life cycle of offshore wind turbines in diverse metocean and geological conditions. The paper, therefore, has the following aims: (a) provide an overview of the complexities and the common SLS performance requirements for offshore wind turbine; (b) discuss the use of physical modelling for verification and validation of innovative design concepts, taking into account all possible angles to de-risk the project; and (c) provide examples of applications in scaled model tests.

【 授权许可】

Unknown