Research and Application to Design Method of Pile Foundation and Jacket for Offshore Wind Turbine

Nowadays, the most common type of foundation for offshore wind turbine is pile-foundation and the most common type of sub-structure is jacket. Thus, the design method of the pile-foundation and jacket for offshore wind turbine is a research focus, referring to offshore engineering and wind energy engineering. The SACS-BLADED joint design method combined SACS, a design software for offshore engineering, with BLADED, a wind load analysis software for wind turbine, is put forward and researched in this paper. The method consists of three steps, namely preliminary design stage, fatigue design stage and other operation conditions design stage, and involves three key design cases, namely mode analysis, ultimate limit analysis and fatigue analysis. The natural frequency of the integrated structure for offshore wind turbine is analyzed in mode analysis, the partial safety factor method and the working stress design method are analyzed in ultimate limit analysis, the stress time history method based on SACS Wind Turbine is analyzed in fatigue analysis. Moreover, the pile-foundation and jacket structure for 6MW offshore wind turbine is designed using the method. As a result, the SACS-BLADED joint design method is a reasonable and effective.