2018 IEEE International Conference on Renewable Energy and Power Engineering

Structural Health Monitoring of Offshore Jacket Structure

Shao-Hua Yang, Cheng-Hsien Chung, Hua-Tung

Wu, Yuan-Yi Chang, Yan-Wei Wu, Jia-Rong Lyu Yueh-Lien, Lee
and Sih-Yin Chen Department of Engineering Science & Ocean Engineering
Department of marine industrial National Taiwan University (NTU)
Ship and ocean industries R&D center (SOIC) Taipei City, Taiwan(R.O.C.)
New Taipei City, Taiwan(R.O.C.) e-mail: yuehlien@ntu.edu.tw
e-mail: w60308@mail.soic.org.tw, chcs@soic.org.tw,
wuht@mail.soic.org.tw, thomasyuanyi@soic.org.tw,
wuyanwei@soic.org.tw, shirley.lyu@soic.org.tw,
sychen@soic.org.tw

Abstract—The technology of condition monitoring for wind
farm operation has been used for many years, such as
Supervisory control and data acquisition (S CADA). However,
structural health monitoring (S HM) of the support structure is
still at the research stage. In this paper an offshore structure
monitoring system for the offshore wind turbine jacket
structure is proposed. The major monitoring items include
vibration, strain and corrosion. In addition to those
corresponding sensors, other instruments are also included in
the proposed system to evaluate the structural integrity of the
offshore wind turbine jacket structure. A detailed description
of the monitoring methods and the framework of system are
provided which is expected to be applied to the real support
structure in the future.
maintenance time. However, the stiffness can be affected by
scouring and corrosion at the same time. To fully understand
the structural response, it is better to include those two
factors. In this research, the monitoring campaign focuses on
strain, vibration and corrosion.
II. W IND TURBINE SYST EM
A. Wind Turbine System
The wind turbine selected for the conceptual monitoring
system is the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
5MW turbine design [1]. The basic information is shown in
the TABLE I.

Keywords-structural health monitoring; jacket structu re; TABLE I. MAIN DIMENSION OF THE W IND T URBINE
operations & maintenance Rated power 5 MW
Rotor, Hub diameter 126 m, 3 m
I. INT RODUCT ION Hub height 90 m
Cut-in, Rated, Cut-Out wind speed 3 m/s, 11.4 m/s, 25 m/s
For offshore structure, the most important O&M Cut-In, Rated Rotor speed 6.9 rpm, 12.1 rpm
(Operations & Maintenance) technology in service life is the RNA mass 350 t
structural health monitoring (SHM) and risk-based reliability Tower mass 347 t
management (RBM). There is currently not enough T ransition piece 666 t
information in Taiwan to establish a relevant database for
risk-based reliability management. A concept for the system
and the framework of mon itoring procedure are proposed
which are expected to be applied to the real support structure
in the future.
The operation mode of the wind turbine and the
metocean condition change with time wh ich cause the
support structure bears the repetitive load. Therefore, the
material will degrade and the hot spot may appear initial
crack (under the circumstance that the structure is composed
of the same material). As the degradation becomes severer,
the stiffness will decrease and the natural frequency will go
down at the same time. Mounting strain gauge and
accelerator could help researchers capture the critical
information of crack growth. After suitable data analysis, the Figure 1. Jacket foundation arrangement
operator could even evaluate residual life and optimize the

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 Figure 2. Safe frequency range of wind turbine structure
0.312Hz 0.314Hz
1 st side-side 1 st fore-aft
Figure 3. Wind turbine mode shapes
B. Support Structure
In general, all loads must be included in the design
combined with nominal densities of the chosen materials.
For loads/structures not covered by the load cases stated in
this design basis, or DNV-OS-J101 [2], the environ mental
loads must be determined based on a return period of 50
years. Fatigue design of the jacket foundation is made as per
[2] and DNVGL-RP-0005 [3]. A typical jacket foundation
arrangement and its main dimension are illustrated in Figure
1.
C. Support Structure
The offshore wind turbine encounters cyclical loads of
wind, wave and rotor for full operation life. During the
design stage, it is necessary to ensure that the wind turbine
does not resonate with the cyclical loads.
The rotor speed ranges between 6.9 and 12.1 rp m which
can be converted to times per second, from 0.115 to 0.202
Hz. With three blade mounted on the wind turbine, the
affecting frequency range is also triple, fro m 0.345 to 0.606
Hz. All possible affecting frequencies are sorted in to Figure
2. The wave and wind frequency distribution are respectively
calculated by JONSWAP [4] and Kaimal spectrum [5]. The
only remained safe range, in which the natural frequency
shall be designed, is between 0.202 and 0.345 Hz.
III. SENSORS
A. Accelerometers
The structural health monitoring system is intended to
identify the first five modes of the entire structure and
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1.771Hz 2.180Hz 2.356Hz
2 nd side-side 2 nd fore-aft 1 st torsion
investigate if the resonance of structure may be excited
during the operation period. To accurately capture the
structural vibration response, the measuring system needs a
custom design to be optimized. The appropriate sensor
selection has the first priority which also affects the
composition of the entire system. The arrangement of
accelerometers is a great issue. It may result in a wrong
judgment upon the structural response if the locations of
sensors are incomprehensive or not on the critical points.
In order to choose the best locations, the modal analysis
needs to be performed first to obtain the structural modes.
Next, the accelerometers should be placed on the features
(largest displacement or rotation) produced by the various
modes. Figure 3 shows that the first five modes calculated by
numerical methods. The first and second modes are side-to-
side (y-axis) and fore -to-aft (x-axis) vibration respectively.
Therefore, two accelerometers are located at the tower top.
The third and fourth modes are also side-to-side and fore-to-
aft vibrations. In order to analyze the differences, two other
accelerometers are located on the middle part of tower where
the modal displacements of third and fourth modes are
greatest. Because the fifth mode is torsion, another two
accelerometers, measuring tangential d irection relative to
tower circumference, are located at the tower top and bottom
side respectively.
There are several ways to choose the best locations for
the sensors. Mathematically, optimal sensor locations can be
formulated as a constrained optimization problem in wh ich
the variables are the candidate sensor locations on a structure.
The constraints are basically determined by the available
degrees-of-freedoms (DOFs) and the total number of given
40
sensors. The objective function to be min imized or
maximized is defined to measure the utility of a sensor
configuration in optimal sensor locations based on the
criteria of Fisher information matrix (FIM) [6-8], modal
assurance criterion (MA C)[9-11] or information entropy (IE)
[12-14], ... etc. Because only the first five modes are
interested in this paper, and their mode shapes are relatively
simple, so the locations of sensors are simply chosen to be
located on the largest displacement obtained from the
numerical modal analysis results .
B. Strain Gauges
The basic principle is that the resistance inside of gauge
will change when it is tightly mounted on the structure
surface. Via the Wheatstone bridge circuit, the system can
detect the slight resistance variation and assess the
corresponding strain value. There are several important
principles for selecting strain gauges. First, the temperature
compensation shall correspond to the targeted material.
Second, normally there are three types of resistance value:
120, 350 and 1000 Oh ms. To optimize the sensing result,
350 Oh ms is the best option due to higher sensitivity
(compared to 120 Oh ms) and lower noise (compared to 1000
Ohms). The monitoring locations are near the potential hot
spots derived from fatigue analysis result. The fatigue
analysis shall be calculated by aeroelastic simulation tool
Bladed together with offshore structure analysis software, for
example, SACs.
C. Corrosion Sensors
Protection of steel structure can be achieved by various
means and especially each corrosion zone must be separately
considered. After assessing the environment and the
corrosion protection system, the monitoring sensors and
corresponding locations on the structure can be decided. The
corrosion rate of an unprotected offshore steel structure
varies largely with position relative to sea level. The
corrosion rate in the splash zone and under mean low t ide
within few meters are severe. In this design, there are three
applied methods among the corrosion protection: corrosion
allowance (CA), coating (PA) and Galvanic (sacrificial)
anode cathodic protection (GACP).
1) Coating health monitor(CHM): The CHM is a
wireless battery powered coating health monitor that uses
electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) principle to
assess coating integrity. The research team of National
significant. In addition, all the different operational states of
the wind turbine need to be considered such as: normal
production, start up, idling, parked, etc. The analysis can also
help wind turbine operator optimize the operation and
maintenance.
A. Signal Conditioning
Structural responses can be induced by the environmental
loads acting on the structure. To accurately identify the
vibration modes among the responses, the sampling rate of
the system should be set carefully. Therefore, it is necessary
to analyse the signal with correct method [16]. For examp le,
to sample 10 points per period for a 5 Hz signal, the
sampling rate should be 50 Hz.
Aliasing is an effect that different signals become
indistinguishable. When aliasing occurs, the original signal
cannot be restored from the sampled signal. According to the
sampling theorem (Nyquist-Shannon Theorem), the
sampling frequency must be greater than twice the highest
frequency of the required measuring range, in order not to
overlap and distort the spectrum. Fro m the above example,
the sampling rate needs to set as 100 Hz.
B. Data Bandwidth and Storage
If we assume the system has 100 measuring channels.
The resolution of measurement module is 24 bit (3 bytes).
Each channel needs 100Hz sampling frequency. Therefore,
the data bandwidth is 30 kB per second. For the storage, 30
kB mu ltiply by one year is around 946 GB if the system
continuously records all data. In reality, only the trend of the
structural response needs to be recorded.
C. Acceleration Analysis
The choice and implementation of algorithms to process
the data and carry out the identification is the most crucial
segment of an intelligent damage detection strategy [17].
This paper considers damage identification as an inverse
problem. This approach usually adopts a physics -based
model of the structure and tries to relate changes in measured
data from the structure to changes in the model. The
algorithms used are mainly based on linear algebra or
optimization theory. In a model-based approach to SHM, the
equations of motion of the system of interest will often be
constructed on the basis of Newton’s second law. For N
reference points or degrees -of-freedom, one will have,
Taiwan University developed a similar device called Coating
Impedance Sensor System (CISS) [15], wh ich is s maller,
cheaper and more compact. This device would be an
alternative to CHM in the future.
2) Electrical resistance (ER) probe: The ER probe is for
measuring the real-time corrosion rate and the effect of the
cathodic protection system. The data fro m individual
monitoring locations can also be displayed as a time based
graphics of either metal loss, or corrosion rate.
IV. SYST EM INT EGRAT ION
The output signal fro m the monitoring system only
represents limited critical information. How to analyze it and
compare with the numerical simulation results are also
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where [m], [c] and [k] are respectively the mass, damping
and stiffness matrices of the structure, {x} and {y} are the
vectors of excitation forces and responses respectively. In
this approach, one would establish an initial model of the
form (1), either by system identification or by constructing a
finite element model. It would be assumed then that the
model represented the normal condition of the system of
interest. During the monitoring phase, data measured from
the structure would be tested in order to see that it remains
consistent with the normal condition model, potentially by
re-estimating system parameters or adjusting them in order to
bring the model into correspondence with new data. When a
significant parameter change is needed in order to maintain
fidelity of the model, the imp lication being that the system
has changed. Because parameters are associated with specific
DOFs of the model, the parameters that change determine
the localization of the damage, and because the parameters
have physical meanings, the extent of the changes establishes
the assessment level.
D. Stress analysis
Due to the locations of strain gauge are determined by
structural analysis, it is the potential hot spot derived from
fatigue analysis. Therefore these locations are representative.
The monitoring system will extract the structural stress in
time domain, and after data processing, fatigue analysis was
performed through cumulative damage with miner’s rule [18]
to recognize the structural fatigue.
E. Corrosion Analysis
For remote monitoring, the applied sensors in this
research are ER probe and CHM. These monitoring locations
can be categorized into four zones. TABLE II. shows a
summary of the way of corrosion protection and sensor
selection corresponding to each corrosion zone.
TABLE II. CORROSION MONITORING SENSORS
Corrosion
Zone Se nsors
Prote ction
Atmospheric zone Coating (PA)
Above sea
Coating (PA)
Splash zone
GACP ER probe
Coating (PA)
Subsea Submerged Zone
GACP ER probe
Buried Zone GACP ER probe
V. CONCLUSION
The objective of the monitoring system is to effectively
detect the structural integrity as time goes by and optimize
the maintenance campaign. The system monitors the
acceleration, strain and corrosion of the structure, and it can
determine the system configuration and sensor specifications
according to the design of different structures. The content of
this report summarizes the essential segments of the
proposed structural health monitoring. However, this
relatively new field still requires more research experience to
complement the monitoring campaign in the future.
A CKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the Bureau of Energy,
Ministry of Economic Affairs, Taiwan for their support
under Grant Number 106-D0106.
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