Extreme wind and wave loads on the next generation of offshore wind turbines

In many areas around the world dominant load on offshore wind turbines is from environmental forces. One example of this is in China where typhoons can do considerable damage to offshore installations. This project builds up from fundamental modelling of the underlying environment and how offshore wind turbines interact with this, to analyzing the structural response and design scenarios.
The project will have four themes: The first stage examines the wave environment in areas of moderate depth and complex bathymetry with wind input. The second and third stages of the project will analyse loads from wind and waves on offshore wind structures. The fourth stage will examine the associated structural and geotechnical design. An ongoing theme throughout the project will be directed towards outreach, networking and dissemination. The project will improve our understanding of the underlying physical processes as well as exploring the design and environmental implications. In particular, the first theme will provide a better fundamental understanding of typhoon-wave interactions, an important topic in its own right in ocean environmental science.
The project will use a wide-range of techniques to tackle the particular problems. These range from analytical modelling of the underlying equations, numerical modelling, physical modelling, and analysis of field data. Insight from all these approaches will be pooled to tackle the challenge of designing offshore wind turbines in harsh maritime environments.

This project addresses one of the key problems in the design of offshore wind turbines. By improving our understanding of loads on offshore wind turbines we can reduce the cost, uncertainty and risk of the technology. This work will tackle some fundamental challenges in ocean engineering and use the insight from this to improve the design of offshore wind structures. The methods and data sets produced will be made available to users in industry and academia and will be directly useable for design and research purposes.