Design of Experiment for Integrated Offshore Windturbine Tower and Monopile

Abstract

[Introduction] When inviting bids for domestic offshore wind power projects, the owner often puts forward requirements for the foundation top load and tower mass provided by the windturbine manufacture, and rarely put forward requirements for the the foundation mass provided by the design institute. During the detailed design stage, the windturbine manufacturer and the design institute optimize the tower and foundation respectively in turn, so it is usually difficult to get the global optimal design with the minimum total mass of the tower and foundation. [Method] An integrated test design method of offshore wind turbine tower and monopile was proposed. Through the test design of an offshore wind power project, several design schemes with different tower types, tower bottoms and monopile diameters were obtained, and the corresponding foundation top load, tower mass and monopile mass were obtained through load calculation and iterative optimization of tower and monopile design. [Result] The results show that the design with the smallest tower bottom load or tower mass is not the optimal one with the smallest mass of the whole support structure. The optimal support structure design with the lightest total mass of tower and monopile can be obtained by the experimental design method. [Conclusion] Based on the results of this paper, it is an effective method to reduce the cost of offshore wind power by adopting the integrated design of experiment of tower and monopile in finding the global optimum for the whole support structure. In the future offshore wind power bidding stage, the owner will formulate the optimal rules for the whole cost of the tower and monopile, and require the use of integrated design of experiment.

Keywords

• integrated design
• offshore windturbine
• experimental design method
• global optimization