ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates the fatigue design of a jacket offshore wind turbine support structure by using probabilistic methods. The fatigue lives of the welded tubular joints are estimated by using the spectral fatigue damage approach. The chapter deals with the system reliability of jacket offshore wind turbine supporting structures, which is a good example of a system of a multi-component redundant structure. The system reliability of the jacket offshore wind turbine structure is estimated to account for the correlation between the welded tubular joints. Van den Berg et al. underlined the relevance of the use of correlation in both system reliability estimation and updating and concluded that neglecting of correlation is conservative for the series system, while it is non-conservative for parallel systems. The predicted fatigue life is estimated assuming that the component is subjected to statistically define random loads, which are simplified to be a stationary Gaussian process.
