Monday  |  Salon 9  |  02:40 PM–03:00 PM

#17058–Continuous Monitoring of the First Two Offshore Wind Farms in the US

This presentation highlights our team’s recent work on instrumentation and monitoring of the first two offshore wind farms in the US, namely the Block Island Wind Farm (BIWF) in Rhode Island and the Coastal Virginia Offshore Windfarm (CVOW). As part of this study, we have instrumented one jacket supported offshore wind turbine (OWT) in the BIWF and two monopile supported OWTs in CVOW. The instrumentation include accelerometers, strain gauges, and inclinometers which are collecting data continuously at 50 Hz sampling rate. The presentation shows physics-based as well as data-driven digital twinning of the instrumented OWTs using vibration and SCADA measurements over months of monitoring. The OWTs are modeled in structural analysis software OpenSees and multi-physics wind-turbine simulation tool OpenFAST. Different batch and sequential Bayesian inference approaches have been used for physics-based digital twinning and virtual sensing as well as estimation of equivalent wind load on the turbines during different operational and environmental conditions. Thrust and dynamic range of the estimated wind load are studies for different ranges of wind speed, rotor speed, and power. The fatigue life of the turbines at several hotspots on the substructure and tower are calculated and compared to those provided by the OWT designers. Furthermore, data-driven machine learning approaches have been used for estimation of wind loads/wind speed from vibration measurements and vice versa, estimation of strains from SCADA data.

Babak Moaveni   Tufts University
Eric Hines   Tufts University