Gradient based structural optimization with fatigue constraints of jacket structures for offshore wind turbines

Investigating the fatigue life of support structures of offshore wind turbines is imperative to avoid unexpected failure. Therefore, in the context of structural optimization, including fatigue constraints is crucial, as the optimized design will meet the design criteria early in the design process without the need for extensive manual post-processing. Ultimately, the optimized design may be lighter and thus reduce both production and installation cost. The aim of this work is to present such a gradient based optimization method with fatigue constraints of jacket structures for the preliminary design phase. The key challenge is to efficiently deal with the very large number of non-linear fatigue constraints and the very large time-history loads that are used in the design of offshore support structures. In this paper main emphasis will be on the analytical design sensitivity analysis used in the optimization. Sensitivities determined by the direct differentiation method and by an aggregated adjoint method will be presented and evaluated.