Demonstration of Using Digital Twins for Offshore Wind Turbine Foundation Monitoring

Abstract

Operation and maintenance of offshore wind turbines (OWTs) require accurate, robust, and continuous monitoring of all components. In this sense, nonlinear and vibration-based techniques have been proposed to enable remote monitoring and deterioration analysis; however, such works tend to focus on the superstructures while simplifying the foundation behavior. Conversely, structural health monitoring tools that incorporate the foundation tend to be deterministic and rely on modal analysis, which limits their application to linear and well-conditioned systems. This paper attempts to bridge these gaps and presents a digital twin for monopile-supported OWTs that includes a comprehensive foundation model and a nonlinear updating method. The digital twin is a beam finite element model with soil-structure interaction of the Winkler type, and it employs nonlinear optimization to identify operational soil parameters using acceleration data. This approach allows time-domain and continuous monitoring of OWTs’ foundation and global responses. Results show that the proposed methodology accurately identifies soil parameters and tracks their changes.