Fatigue design load calculations of the offshore NREL 5 MW benchmark turbine using quadrature rule techniques

A novel approach is proposed to reduce, compared with the conventional binning approach, the large number of aeroelastic code evaluations that are necessary to obtain equivalent loads acting on wind turbines. These loads describe the effect of long-term environmental variability on the fatigue loads of a horizontal-axis wind turbine. In particular, Design Load Case 1.2, as standardized by IEC, is considered. The approach is based on numerical integration techniques and, more specifically, quadrature rules. The quadrature rule used in this work is a recently proposed “implicit” quadrature rule, which has the main advantage that it can be constructed directly using measurements of the environment. It is demonstrated that the proposed approach yields accurate estimations of the equivalent loads using a significantly reduced number of aeroelastic model evaluations (compared with binning). Moreover, the error introduced by the seeds (introduced by averaging over random wind fields and sea states) is incorporated in the quadrature framework, yielding an even further reduction in the number of aeroelastic code evaluations. The reduction in computational time is demonstrated by assessing the fatigue loads on the NREL 5 MW reference offshore wind turbine in conjunction with measurement data obtained at the North Sea, for both a simplified and a full load case.