Validated extrapolation of measured damage within an offshore wind farm using instrumented fleet leaders

Abstract

As the older wind farms are slowly reaching their design lifetime, topics like fatigue and lifetime assessment gain importance. To decide on a possible lifetime extension of the turbine and its foundation, an accurate fatigue assessment for every wind turbine in the farm is needed. As the installation of specific sensors needed for a fatigue assessment is too time consuming and costly, the "Fleet Leader Concept" is applied and validated in this paper. Here, a few turbines are instrumented and a fatigue assessment based on rainflow counting and Miner's rule can be performed. For a farm-wide fatigue assessment, the obtained damage is extrapolated towards the other turbines. Sample based bootstrapping is performed to introduce an uncertainty on the results. A successful extrapolation was obtained for in-field measurements at an older offshore wind farm. In general, relative errors of less than 5% on damage were found.