D. Singh
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10 records found
1
This thesis began with the goal of developing a data-driven modeling approach that maps site conditions to the load statistics on floating offshore wind turbines. The motivation for this research emerged from a need to accelerate the site-selection process, include more site variables, and achieve accurate load estimates while keeping the computational expense low.
Before installation, all modern wind turbines must be carefully assessed for structural loads to ensure safety and performance throughout their lifetimes. Floating turbines, in particular, introduce more complexity—more environmental variables to consider, and higher uncertainty in the dynamic response. This added complexity makes analyzing structural loads expensive and time-consuming, often more so than for fixed-bottom counterparts, and it makes understanding the behavior of floating wind turbines even more important. The process of fatigue damage calculation, in particular, is computationally intensive, often requiring thousands of costly simulations. Because it is not feasible to run simulations for every possible sea state, engineers typically reduce the problem by selecting a set of variables and binning or lumping sea states to limit the number of required simulations. However, for floating wind turbines, the choice of which variables to include and how to perform this binning remains an open question. This motivates the use of reliable data-driven surrogate models that can make quick estimates of loads on wind turbines while maintaining high accuracy.
Although most existing work relies on deterministic surrogate models, offshore wind environments exhibit strong stochasticity, making turbine loads inherently uncertain. This motivates the need for uncertainty quantification to characterize not only expected loads but also estimate their conditional variability. This dissertation, therefore, develops a probabilistic data-driven methodology that propagates environmental uncertainty to the 10-minute damage equivalent loads of onshore, offshore, and floating offshore wind turbines.
Several deterministic and probabilistic data-driven models are benchmarked on onshore and fixed-bottom offshore wind turbines. The evaluation consists not only of judging the accuracy of a model, but also of practical aspects such as the robustness of the model, sensitivity to hyperparameters, and ease of implementation. Compared to deterministic approaches, which require multiple seed repetitions prior to training, it is demonstrated that with probabilistic models, this step may not be necessary to achieve high accuracy predictions (𝑅2 > 0.95), thereby saving precious computational resources needed to generate the training database. Widely used Gaussian process regression is shown to accurately estimate the conditional mean of the response with a relatively small training dataset of Q102 - 103) samples. Wasserstein-conditional generative adversarial network is used as one of the probabilistic regression models. Despite learning the functional mapping with errors comparable to the best-performing models, it is found to be very complex to implement and requires extensive hyperparameter tuning. Simpler 4th-degree polynomials are shown to make good predictions in the onshore case, but are prone to overfitting and susceptible to the additional noise introduced by the hydrodynamic features. Overall, mixture density networks are shown to provide the best combination of consistency, accuracy, and practical ease of use.
Based on this analysis, the study extends the use of mixture density networks to a more sophisticated application of spar-type floating offshore wind turbine. It is shown to successfully capture the conditional response in terms of the normalized 2-Wasserstein distance despite the added complexity. The surrogate is further used to make probabilistic estimates of the lifetime damage equivalent loads on four potential floating wind turbine sites. Since the surrogate model is fast (order of milliseconds once trained), load predictions can be made over all sea states within seconds, without the need to lump or bin the sea states beforehand. The uncertainty in the aggregated lifetime fatigue loads due to stochastic inputs is extremely narrow, with variability on the order of only 0.1–0.5% of their mean values. This results from summing the 10-minute damage equivalent loads over a million occurrences, effectively nullifying the impact of the outliers. The use of a probabilistic surrogate that correctly captures the conditional distribution is still useful, as it minimizes the aggregation of error in the final response.
Through these analyses, it is demonstrated that surrogate models can be powerful tools for fatigue estimation in the site analysis process, especially for floating wind turbines, where the choice of variables and binning methods is still an open question. Additionally, using probabilistic surrogates like mixture density networks helps reduce bias in calculating the aggregate mean fatigue, as the conditional distributions are heteroscedastic and not always normally distributed.
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This thesis began with the goal of developing a data-driven modeling approach that maps site conditions to the load statistics on floating offshore wind turbines. The motivation for this research emerged from a need to accelerate the site-selection process, include more site variables, and achieve accurate load estimates while keeping the computational expense low.
Before installation, all modern wind turbines must be carefully assessed for structural loads to ensure safety and performance throughout their lifetimes. Floating turbines, in particular, introduce more complexity—more environmental variables to consider, and higher uncertainty in the dynamic response. This added complexity makes analyzing structural loads expensive and time-consuming, often more so than for fixed-bottom counterparts, and it makes understanding the behavior of floating wind turbines even more important. The process of fatigue damage calculation, in particular, is computationally intensive, often requiring thousands of costly simulations. Because it is not feasible to run simulations for every possible sea state, engineers typically reduce the problem by selecting a set of variables and binning or lumping sea states to limit the number of required simulations. However, for floating wind turbines, the choice of which variables to include and how to perform this binning remains an open question. This motivates the use of reliable data-driven surrogate models that can make quick estimates of loads on wind turbines while maintaining high accuracy.
Although most existing work relies on deterministic surrogate models, offshore wind environments exhibit strong stochasticity, making turbine loads inherently uncertain. This motivates the need for uncertainty quantification to characterize not only expected loads but also estimate their conditional variability. This dissertation, therefore, develops a probabilistic data-driven methodology that propagates environmental uncertainty to the 10-minute damage equivalent loads of onshore, offshore, and floating offshore wind turbines.
Several deterministic and probabilistic data-driven models are benchmarked on onshore and fixed-bottom offshore wind turbines. The evaluation consists not only of judging the accuracy of a model, but also of practical aspects such as the robustness of the model, sensitivity to hyperparameters, and ease of implementation. Compared to deterministic approaches, which require multiple seed repetitions prior to training, it is demonstrated that with probabilistic models, this step may not be necessary to achieve high accuracy predictions (𝑅2 > 0.95), thereby saving precious computational resources needed to generate the training database. Widely used Gaussian process regression is shown to accurately estimate the conditional mean of the response with a relatively small training dataset of Q102 - 103) samples. Wasserstein-conditional generative adversarial network is used as one of the probabilistic regression models. Despite learning the functional mapping with errors comparable to the best-performing models, it is found to be very complex to implement and requires extensive hyperparameter tuning. Simpler 4th-degree polynomials are shown to make good predictions in the onshore case, but are prone to overfitting and susceptible to the additional noise introduced by the hydrodynamic features. Overall, mixture density networks are shown to provide the best combination of consistency, accuracy, and practical ease of use.
Based on this analysis, the study extends the use of mixture density networks to a more sophisticated application of spar-type floating offshore wind turbine. It is shown to successfully capture the conditional response in terms of the normalized 2-Wasserstein distance despite the added complexity. The surrogate is further used to make probabilistic estimates of the lifetime damage equivalent loads on four potential floating wind turbine sites. Since the surrogate model is fast (order of milliseconds once trained), load predictions can be made over all sea states within seconds, without the need to lump or bin the sea states beforehand. The uncertainty in the aggregated lifetime fatigue loads due to stochastic inputs is extremely narrow, with variability on the order of only 0.1–0.5% of their mean values. This results from summing the 10-minute damage equivalent loads over a million occurrences, effectively nullifying the impact of the outliers. The use of a probabilistic surrogate that correctly captures the conditional distribution is still useful, as it minimizes the aggregation of error in the final response.
Through these analyses, it is demonstrated that surrogate models can be powerful tools for fatigue estimation in the site analysis process, especially for floating wind turbines, where the choice of variables and binning methods is still an open question. Additionally, using probabilistic surrogates like mixture density networks helps reduce bias in calculating the aggregate mean fatigue, as the conditional distributions are heteroscedastic and not always normally distributed.
Reliable prediction of aviation’s environmental impact, including the effect of nitrogen oxides on ozone, is vital for effective mitigation against its contribution to global warming. Estimating this climate impact however, in terms of the short-term ozone instantaneous radiative forcing, requires computationally-expensive chemistry-climate model simulations that limit practical applications such as climate-optimised planning. Existing surrogates neglect the large uncertainties in their predictions due to unknown environmental conditions and missing features. Relative to these surrogates, we propose a high-accuracy probabilistic surrogate that not only provides mean predictions but also quantifies heteroscedastic uncertainties in climate impact estimates. Our model is trained on one of the most comprehensive chemistry-climate model datasets for aviation-induced nitrogen oxide impacts on ozone. Leveraging feature selection techniques, we identify essential predictors that are readily available from weather forecasts to facilitate the implementation therein. We show that our surrogate model is more accurate than homoscedastic models and easily outperforms existing linear surrogates. We then predict the climate impact of a frequently-flown flight in the European Union, and discuss limitations of our approach.
typically unfit for fixed bottom designs. The complex interaction between the structural
behavior of the floating offshore wind turbine and the stochastic site conditions, however,
is an active area of research. Characterizing the relationship between the environmental
conditions and loads may help design reduced-order models, surrogate models, and physicsbased engineering models for floating wind turbines. This study uses data from the TetraSpar prototype equipped with a 3.6 MW Siemens Gamesa wind turbine. One-to-one simulations performed using an aero-servo-hydro-elastic software are included for comparison. Various tools, including linear correlation, mutual information, feature ordering using conditional independence, and sensitivity analysis using a data-driven variogram fit, are used for the assessment. This study is also helpful in validating the engineering model for future global sensitivity analysis using elementary effects or Sobol indices that require a rigid sampling of features and can, therefore, only be calculated with simulation tools. We find a good agreement between the experiments and simulations. The 10-min. damage equivalent loads on the tower show a correlation, particularly with the wind speed statistics and the significant wave height. ...
typically unfit for fixed bottom designs. The complex interaction between the structural
behavior of the floating offshore wind turbine and the stochastic site conditions, however,
is an active area of research. Characterizing the relationship between the environmental
conditions and loads may help design reduced-order models, surrogate models, and physicsbased engineering models for floating wind turbines. This study uses data from the TetraSpar prototype equipped with a 3.6 MW Siemens Gamesa wind turbine. One-to-one simulations performed using an aero-servo-hydro-elastic software are included for comparison. Various tools, including linear correlation, mutual information, feature ordering using conditional independence, and sensitivity analysis using a data-driven variogram fit, are used for the assessment. This study is also helpful in validating the engineering model for future global sensitivity analysis using elementary effects or Sobol indices that require a rigid sampling of features and can, therefore, only be calculated with simulation tools. We find a good agreement between the experiments and simulations. The 10-min. damage equivalent loads on the tower show a correlation, particularly with the wind speed statistics and the significant wave height.
Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM) are used to build surrogate models to forecast time-series blade loads for both fixed and floating offshore wind turbines. In this paper, we train surrogate models on datasets generated with OpenFAST on the IEA-15MW-RWT under a range of metocean conditions. The aim of the surrogate models is to generate load forecasts inexpensively and accurately such that they can be used in a model predictive controller. Two cases are investigated with different model inputs: one with only measurements available to typical PI controllers and another one with additional wave elevation and deflection measurements (alongside the endogenous variable). The model performances are evaluated and compared. It was found that for the fixed turbine, the models predicted all three blade loads to a high degree of accuracy. The floating turbine surrogate models performed relatively worse, but edgewise and pitching moments are still reasonably accurate. The surrogate model forecasts the flapwise moment to a satisfactory accuracy only in 58% out of 400 test cases. The addition of wave elevation and blade deflection features did not significantly improve the prediction performance of the surrogate, demonstrating that just the information used by current PI controllers may be sufficient for forecasting blade loads.
This paper presents a surrogate-assisted optimisation approach to speed up the substructure analysis in the preliminary design phase. The approach consists of replacing the radiation-diffraction analysis in a frequency domain analysis model for floating wind turbines with a data-driven surrogate model predicting the hydrodynamic coefficients for parameterised substructure geometries. This procedure is compared with the reference approach of estimating the hydrodynamic coefficients via radiation-diffraction analysis. A representative use case of assessing the trade-off between minimising the capital cost and reducing the wave-induced nacelle acceleration standard deviation for a semi-submersible substructure is presented. The accuracy of the surrogate model is found to increase significantly up to training datasets consisting of 400 designs and less noticeably afterwards. For a dataset consisting of 400 designs, the mean error on the prediction of the hydrodynamic coefficients and the error at one standard deviation from the mean are generally below 7% and 10%, respectively. For the same dataset size, the mean error on the most probable maximum wave-induced pitch over a 3h storm period is below 17%, while the error at one standard deviation from the mean is lower than 27%. The same values for the most probable maximum nacelle acceleration are under 7% and 12%, respectively. The surrogate model can capture the trade-off between the two objective functions, and the optimal designs identified with the surrogate model generally follow the same trend as those obtained with the reference model. However, relying on the surrogate model for performing the analysis of the substructure introduces local minima in the objective function that cause a discrepancy between the optimal designs identified with the surrogate model and those identified with the reference model.
1. Expanding the geographical coverage of iRF (training data) by running EMAC simulations in more regions (North & South America, Eurasia, Africa and Australasia) at multiple cruise flight altitudes,
2. Following an objective approach to selecting atmospheric variables (feature selection) and considering the importance of local as well as non-local effects,
3. Regressing the iRF against selected atmospheric variables using supervised machine learning techniques such as homoscedastic and heteroscedastic Gaussian process regression.
We present a new surrogate model that predicts iRF of aviation NOx-O3 effects on a regular basis with confidence levels, which not only improves our scientific understanding of NOx-O3 effects, but also increases the potential of global climate-optimised flight planning. ...
1. Expanding the geographical coverage of iRF (training data) by running EMAC simulations in more regions (North & South America, Eurasia, Africa and Australasia) at multiple cruise flight altitudes,
2. Following an objective approach to selecting atmospheric variables (feature selection) and considering the importance of local as well as non-local effects,
3. Regressing the iRF against selected atmospheric variables using supervised machine learning techniques such as homoscedastic and heteroscedastic Gaussian process regression.
We present a new surrogate model that predicts iRF of aviation NOx-O3 effects on a regular basis with confidence levels, which not only improves our scientific understanding of NOx-O3 effects, but also increases the potential of global climate-optimised flight planning.