Reliability-based serviceability limit state design of a jacket substructure for an offshore wind turbine

The development of a structurally optimized foundation design has become one of the main research objectives for offshore wind turbines (OWTs). The design process should be carried out in a probabilistic way due to the uncertainties involved, such as using parametric uncertainties regarding material and geometric properties, and model uncertainties in resistance prediction models and regarding environmental loads. Traditional simple deterministic checking procedures do not guarantee an optimized design because the associated uncertainties are not fully considered. In this paper, a reliability analysis framework is proposed to support the optimized design of jacket foundations for OWTs. The reliability analysis mainly considers the serviceability limit state of the structure according to the requirements of the code. The framework consists of two parts: (i) an important parameter identification procedure based on statistical correlation analysis and (ii) a finite element-simulation-based reliability estimation procedure. The procedure is demonstrated through a jacket structure design of a 3 MW OWT. The analysis results show that the statistical correlation analysis can help to identify the parameters necessary for the overall structural performance. The Latin hypercube sampling and the Monte Carlo simulation using FE models effectively and efficiently evaluate the reliability of the structure while not relying on a surrogate limit state function. A comparison between the proposed framework and the deterministic design shows that the framework can help to achieve a better result closer to the target reliability level.