Beschreibung
For the design and optimisation of offshore wind turbines, the knowledge of realistic environmental conditions and utilisation of well-founded simulation constraints is very important, as both influence the structural behaviour and power output in numerical simulations. However, real high-quality data, especially for research purposes, is scarcely available. This is why, in this work, a comprehensive data basis of thirteen environmental conditions at wind turbine locations in the North and Baltic Sea is derived using data of the FINO research platforms. For simulation constraints, like the simulation length and start-up time, well-founded recommendations in literature are also rare. Nevertheless, it is known that the choice of simulation lengths and start-up times fundamentally affects the quality and computing time of simulations. For this reason, studies of convergence for both parameters are conducted to determine adequate values depending on the type of substructure, the wind speed and the considered loading (fatigue or ultimate). As the main purpose of both the data basis and the simulation constraints is to compromise realistic data for probabilistic design approaches and to serve as a guidance for further studies in order to enable more realistic and accurate simulations, all results are freely available and easy to apply.
