Validation of Superelement Modelling of Complex Offshore Support Structures

Modern large MW wind turbines today are installed at larger water depth than applicable for traditional monopile substructure. It appears that foundation types such as jacket and tripod are gaining more popularity for these locations. For certification purposes, a full set of design load calculations consisting of up to thousands design load cases needs to be evaluated.

However, even the simplest aero-elastic model of such structures has many more DOFs than monopile, resulting in excessive computation burden. In order to deal with this problem, the superelement method has been introduced for modelling such structures. One superelement method has been proven very promising in the previous project of Wave Loads [1] and a fundamental question in such DOFs reduction methods is which modes that are essential and which modes can be neglected.

For the jacket structure, the introduction of a gravity-buoyancy mode (GB mode) demonstrates that this mode is needed for accurate load simulation. A case study is performed in this report to validate the proposed method based on a reference wind turbine on a jacket foundation.