Supervisors: Jesper Mathias Stolpe, DTU Wind Energy and Associate Professor Henrik Bredmose, DTU Wind Energy.
External examiners: Associate Professor Niels L. Pedersen, DTU Mechanical Engineering, Professor Pierre Jacques GhislainDuysinx, University of Liège, Professor Dr.-IngRaimundRolfes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover
Title: Design Optimization of Jacket Structures for Mass Production
Designing offshore wind turbine structures with mathematics
The goal of this thesis is to use advanced mathematics to design the support structures for offshore wind farms. Offshore wind turbine support structures are heavy and expensive to build, move, and install. Better designs could therefore significantly reduce costs for the offshore wind industry, and thereby provide more clean energy to the world.
In this thesis I have developed a method which can in fact design a jacket in only a few minutes. This has never been done before, and can become a powerful tool for design engineers. In the first paper we show how the method can be used for conceptual design. By optimizing hundreds of different jackets, we can better understand how factors such as leg distance and number of sections influence the weight and dynamic properties of the jacket. In the second paper I have collaborated with researchers from Aalborg University and NTNU to compare the state of the art methods for support structure optimization. We found that my method is valuable in the early design phase, and that more time-consuming and advanced methods can be used when the design is almost finished.
Structural optimization is today an integral part of how cars, planes and rockets are designed. With this thesis I hope to bring offshore support structure design into the modern age as well.