Monitoring the Consumed Fatigue Life on Three Offshore Wind Turbines

Fatigue life is often a design driver for the foundations of offshore wind turbines. A continuously monitored fatigue life can thus serve an important role in deciding over wind farm inspections, repowering or lifetime extension. As such it should be an integral part of any structural health monitoring system on offshore wind turbines' foundations. This paper introduces the OWI-lab fatigue monitoring strategy and uses data from three turbines, equipped with (optical) strain gauges, off the Belgian coast to illustrate the impact of environmental and operational conditions on the consumption of fatigue life. The final goal of the research to achieve a farm-wide fatigue assessment using a limited number of instrumented turbines.