ABSTRACT
Fatigue assessment for Offshore Floating Wind Turbines (OFWT) subjected to random environmental loads has been a crucially important issue in design phase. According to the analysis of the joint distribution of wind and waves, the improved lumping approach can be proposed. The traditional lumping approach for fatigue assessment of offshore structures is normally applied in the pure hydrodynamic loading rather than taking wind-wave correlations into account. There is a tendency to mount wind turbines on floating structures. However, the design of the offshore systems is faced with many technical challenges due to severe environmental conditions. Fatigue assessment is performed for a spar-type wind turbine tower base using the improved lumping approach. Traditional lumping approach does not take wind into account and wind climate is a quite vital component in the fatigue design of OFWTs. For the fatigue assessment of individual block, dynamic response can be obtained from time domain or frequency domain approaches.
