Probabilistic fatigue design of reinforced-concrete wind turbine foundations

Abstract

Probabilistic fatigue design of wind turbines is a new approach to optimize the design by reducing in a reliability- and cost-optimal way the amount of materials used for the construction, ultimately reducing the cost of energy. This paper presents such a probabilistic framework for reliability assessment of onshore wind turbine foundations with aim to optimize the design. This framework includes stochastic modelling of fatigue strength based on a large database of test results, stochastic modelling of the fatigue load (wind), modelling of the related epistemic and aleatory uncertainties, along with a case study showing how optimization could be exercised using the reliability-based framework.