Feasibility of modal expansion for virtual sensing in offshore wind jacket substructures

Abstract The present paper investigates the feasibility of modal expansion-based virtual sensing in the context of offshore wind jacket substructures. For this specific application, issues have been reported when expanding wind-driven brace vibrations and wave-driven vibrations in the splash-zone based on a sensor network placed solely above the sea level. These limitations are addressed in this paper by extending the sensor network with sub-sea vibration sensors and a wave radar sensor, which allow for capturing local brace vibration modes and the wave-driven vibration response. The brace expansion is thus improved by including the local brace vibration modes in the expansion basis, while the representation of wave-driven vibrations is improved by including load-dependent Ritz vectors computed based on input from the wave radar sensor. The merit of the proposed extension is explored using a numerical model of an offshore wind turbine supported by a jacket substructure in a simulation setting with different operational and environmental conditions. It is documented that the extended setup provides an improvement in the expansion-based estimation of both wind- and wave-driven vibrations. The former improvement is particularly relevant for operational cases, while the latter is relevant for idling cases. Despite the documented improvements, a systematic reduction in the expansion quality is observed for higher wind speeds in operational cases for both the basic and the extended setup. It is contended that this phenomenon is due to the operational variability of the controller, which violates the fundamental assumption of the structural system being linear and time-invariant.