Offshore Wind Turbine Loads and Motions in Unstable Atmospheric Conditions

Abstract

Even though it is widely known that unstable atmospheric stability conditions can lead to higher turbulence, the use of proper turbulent wind models considering unstable conditions are not often used in the simulation of loads and motions of offshore wind turbines. For this reason, the Højstrup model, which was specifically developed for unstable conditions, is used to simulate a spar-buoy offshore wind turbine (OWT) and investigate the importance of unstable conditions in the design of floating offshore wind turbines. It is found that fatigue damage of a spar-buoy OWT is strongly influenced by unstable conditions, where very unstable condition gives 65% higher fatigue damage than neutral conditions for the tower top torsion, followed by 37% higher for tower base side-side bending and 24% higher for blade root flap-wise mode.