Performance-based wind engineering and uncertainty propagation in the design of offshore wind turbines

This paper focuses on the implementation of a multi-level modeling philosophy within a probabilistic procedure, in order to consider both global (macro-level) and detailed (meso-level) aspects that drive the design of offshore wind turbines. A consistent Performance-Based Design procedure already defined by the authors is briefly discussed and some results are presented with reference to a jacket support structure. In the second part, the relevance of a multi-level modeling approach is discussed. A meso-level model of the turbine blade is developed and analyzed, together with a refined model of the aerodynamic loads. All the analyses are carried out studying the structural dynamics in the frequency domain, a consistent choice aimed to the containment of the computational effort required by a probabilistic design procedure.