Lidar-based virtual load sensors for mooring lines using artificial neural networks

Floating offshore wind turbines are equipped with a variety of sensors, which are measuring data, valuable for the control and monitoring of the turbine. However, reliable measurements are difficult or costly for some physical quantities. This includes load estimates for mooring lines and fairleads. In this study, we investigate an approach using wind speed measurements from a forward-looking nacelle-based lidar as inputs to long short-term memory networks to estimate fairlead tensions. Nacelle-based lidar wind speed measurements on floating offshore wind turbines are influenced by platform motions, in particular by the rotational pitch displacement and the surge displacement of the floater. Therefore, the lidar wind speed measurement contains information about the dynamic behavior of the floater. In turn, the floater's dynamics determine the fair lead loads. Thus in this study, we directly use the lidar-measured line of sight (LOS) wind speeds to estimate mooring line tensions. The model training data is obtained using the aero-elastic wind turbine simulation tool openFAST in combination with the numerical lidar simulation framework ViConDAR. Results show, that lidar-based virtual load sensors can reproduce mean fairlead tension as well as low-frequency fluctuations, with varying accuracy dependant on the combination of input features. For the model which is only using LOS wind speed measurements as input a normalized root mean squared error of 0.55 was obtained.