Research Initiation Award: Uncertainty Modeling, Probabilistic Models, and Life-cycle Reliability of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines

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Research Initiation Awards provide support for faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities who are building a research program. It is expected that the award helps to further the faculty member's research capability and effectiveness, improves research and teaching at her home institution, and involves undergraduate students in research experiences. The award to Prairie View A&M University has potential broader and societal impact in a number of areas. Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) have been considered as one of the most promising alternatives to access energy resources with vast available space and fewer restrictions and regulations. The project seeks to analyze floating offshore wind turbine uncertainties that arise due to the ocean environment and hydrodynamic calculations, as well as due to uncertainties in the structural and mechanical systems, which threaten the reliability and the feasibility of FOWTs. Undergraduate students, high school students and students from community colleges will gain research experiences through this project. The current floating offshore wind turbine technologies have challenges to be resolved in order to produce sustainable and cost-effective power. Semi-submersible type FOWTs are known to be one of the most promising options with construction and maintenance cost problems yet to be solved. This project focuses on identification of the uncertainties and on estimating the structural safety factors. The research objectives of this project are to: understand the uncertainties that exist in FOWTs; predict the structural behavior and life-cycle structural reliability of FOWTs; and obtain safety factors for structural design of semi-submersible-type FOWTs that uniquely consider the uncertainties and coupled dynamics of aerodynamics of the wind turbine and hydrodynamics of the floating body under extreme environmental loads. By considering the uncertainties found, the probabilistic capacity and demand models for structural components of FOWTs will be developed using a Bayesian Method. Lastly, the developed models will be used to estimate the life-cycle structural reliability and to obtain the safety factors for the base tower moment and shear forces of FOWTs. The results of this research may eventually reduce the current challenge of the high cost of FOWTs.