FLOAT: Fatigue-Aware Design Optimization of Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Towers

2026-01-04

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study addresses the high computational cost of high-fidelity simulations traditionally used in fatigue assessment of floating offshore wind turbine towers, which hinders design innovation. To overcome this limitation, the authors propose the FLOAT framework, which integrates lightweight fatigue estimation, Monte Carlo-based joint wind-wave sampling, and a high-fidelity platform dynamics calibration model to enable efficient co-optimization. The framework is applied for the first time to fatigue-driven redesign of the IEA 22 MW floating wind turbine tower. The resulting design meets the 25-year fatigue life requirement while significantly reducing simulation demands, avoiding resonance, and achieving the lightest mass among comparable designs. Validation shows a mean relative error of −8.6% in fatigue predictions.

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Abstract

Upscaling is central to offshore wind's cost-reduction strategy, with increasingly large rotors and nacelles requiring taller and stronger towers. In Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs), this trend amplifies fatigue loads due to coupled wind-wave dynamics and platform motion. Conventional fatigue evaluation requires millions of high-fidelity simulations, creating prohibitive computational costs and slowing design innovation. This paper presents FLOAT (Fatigue-aware Lightweight Optimization and Analysis for Towers), a framework that accelerates fatigue-aware tower design. It integrates three key contributions: a lightweight fatigue estimation method that enables efficient optimization, a Monte Carlo-based probabilistic wind-wave sampling approach that reduces required simulations, and enhanced high-fidelity modeling through pitch/heave-platform calibration and High-Performance Computing execution. The framework is applied to the IEA 22 MW FOWT tower, delivering, to the authors'knowledge, the first fatigue-oriented redesign of this benchmark model: FLOAT 22 MW FOWT tower. Validation against 6,468 simulations shows that the optimized tower extends the estimated fatigue life from 9 months to 25 years while avoiding resonance, and that the lightweight fatigue estimator provides conservative predictions with a mean relative error of -8.6%. Achieving this lifetime requires increased tower mass, yielding the lowest-mass fatigue-compliant design. All results and the reported lifetime extension are obtained within the considered fatigue scope (DLC 1.2, aligned wind-wave conditions). By reducing simulation requirements by orders of magnitude, FLOAT enables reliable and scalable tower design for next-generation FOWTs, bridging industrial needs and academic research while generating high-fidelity datasets that can support data-driven and AI-assisted design methodologies.

Problem

• floating offshore wind turbine
• fatigue loads
• tower design optimization
• computational cost
• wind-wave dynamics

Innovation

• fatigue-aware design
• floating offshore wind turbine
• lightweight fatigue estimation
• probabilistic wind-wave sampling
• high-fidelity modeling