Long-term simulation of wind turbine structure for distributed loading describing long-term wind loads for preliminary design

In order to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels, a policy to increase the production capacity of wind turbine is set up. This can be achieved with increasing the dimensions of offshore wind turbine blades. However, this increase in size implies serious problems of stability and durability. Considering the cost of large turbines and financial consequences of their premature failure, it is imperative to carry out numerical simulations over long periods. Here, an energy-conserving time-stepping scheme is proposed in order to ensure the satisfying computation of long-term response. The proposed scheme is implemented for three-dimensional solid based on Biot strain measures, which is used for modeling flexible blades. The simulations are performed at full spatial scale. For reliable design process, the wind loads should be represented as realistically as possible, including the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) dynamic effects on wind turbine blades. However, full-scale 3D FSI simulations for long-term wind loading remain of prohibitive computation cost. Thus, the model to quantify the wind loads proposed here is a simple, but not too simple to be representative for preliminary design studies.