Statistical evaluation of the identified structural parameters of an idling offshore wind turbine

With the increased need for renewable energy, new offshore wind farms are being developed at an unprecedented scale. However, as the costs of offshore wind energy are still too high, design optimization and new innovations are required for lowering its cost. The design of modern day offshore wind turbines relies on numerical models for estimating ultimate and fatigue loads of the turbines. The dynamic behavior and the resulting structural loading of the turbines is determined for a large part by its structural properties, such as the natural frequencies and damping ratios. Hence, it is important to obtain accurate estimates of these modal properties. For this purpose stochastic subspace identification (SSI), in combination with clustering and statistical evaluation methods, is used to obtain the variance of the identified modal properties of an installed 3.6MW offshore wind turbine in idling conditions. It is found that one is able to obtain confidence intervals for the means of eigenfrequencies and damping ratios of the fore-aft and side-side modes of the wind turbine.