Fatigue Life of Wind Turbines

A new generation of computational models
Wind energy production currently accounts for 38% of renewable energy generation capacity in the EU. For this reason, it has been chosen by the EU Commission as the centerpiece to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. As part of the strategy, the objective is to increase the offshore wind power capacity from 12GW to 300 GW. Despite the great advances that wind turbines have made in recent years to achieve this ambitious goal, life cycle management continues to be a bottleneck in the development of this energy sector. Turbine life cycles are short, and the costs associated with their operation and maintenance are high. The urgency for a paradigm shift in the design and fitness-for-service assessment is growing, since older offshore wind farms are reaching the end of their service life. New methodologies are therefore needed to obtain reliable estimates of risk and durability for more efficient designs. Corrosion fatigue, due to exposure to aggressive seawater environments and high dynamic loads, is the most critical factor limiting such decisions. Given its complexity, current design and assessment methods are overly empirical and conservative. However, recent advancements in fracture mechanics have led to the development of new numerical strategies for predicting material fatigue life. Are these techniques suitable for offshore wind turbines?

Speaker
Dr. Sara Jiménez Alfaro completed her PhD in 2023 at Sorbonne Université, funded by an MSCA predoctoral fellowship within the international training network NEWFRAC. Her doctoral research focused on numerical fracture modelling in advanced ceramics. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London, supported by an MSCA COFUND fellowship under the Energy 4 Future network, co-funded by Iberdrola. Her project, “Next-generation corrosion-fatigue models for the safe operation of wind turbines,” aims to develop numerical tools to predict the fatigue life of offshore wind turbines by coupling corrosion and fatigue phenomena. Dr. Jiménez-Alfaro is also a member of the TEP-131 research group at the University of Seville. Throughout her career, she has received four research awards for her presentations and contributions at international conferences, including the Euromech Colloquium 635 and the Iberian Conference on Structural Integrity.