Approaching the ideal design of jacket substructures for offshore wind turbines with a Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm

The state-of-the-art design of jacket substructures for offshore wind energy converters depends highly on empirical knowledge and is usually limited to few iterations for tube diameters and thicknesses. To address this point and improve the whole design procedure, a holistic methodology is proposed, in which the entire structural design is formulated as a mathematical optimization problem with practically relevant objectives and constraints. This is solved by a meta-heuristic Particle Swarm Optimization approach with some modifications to face constraint handling. The method is applied for the design of a jacket substructure for the NREL 5MW turbine and the results show massive potential concerning cost reduction of offshore wind turbines, but motivate to spend further effort on the development of this method, particularly with regard to computation time, too.