Determination of Representative Offshore Wind Turbine Locations for Fatigue Load Monitoring by Means of Hierarchical Clustering

A fundamental issue during the planning of offshore wind farms is to determine representative locations for fatigue load monitoring, which can be used to reduce maintenance costs. The contribution of this work is an integrated concept based on geometry variations of the jacket substructure. A hierarchical clustering algorithm, using distance measures between these variations, aims to group turbines according to similar fatigue behavior under consideration of local environmental conditions such as wind speed, water depth, and foundation stiffness. Based on this procedure, common jacket designs for each cluster are determined. Next, one location for each cluster is identified to be most suitable for monitoring. At last, uncertainties in fatigue lifetime for other locations in the cluster are given.