Preliminary evaluation of monopile foundation dimensions for an offshore wind turbine by analyzing hydrodynamic load in the frequency domain

Although design of offshore wind turbines has many similarities to that of onshore turbines, a lot of considerations should be made for the additional substructure imposed on hydrodynamic loads. The additional substructure prolongs the total tower length, increasing the tower bending moment and lowering the natural bending frequencies of the tower. Accordingly, system dynamic analyses associated with hydrodynamic load should be performed in the frequency domain in order to avoid bending modes of tower from the operation frequency ranges. In this paper, a method to generate hydrodynamic load for a finite element analysis is introduced, considering the characteristics of sea conditions for a candidate site of demonstration offshore wind farm in the west sea of Korea. In addition, a wind energy conversion system with a monopile foundation is fully modeled using the finite element method to simulate the various conditions based on IEC standard. Based on the FEM analyses of tower bending modes, optimal dimensions of the monopile for the candidate site are proposed.