Abstract

The development of offshore renewable energy structures is growing at a fast pace, and their maintenance will become critical in further years. Because steel corrosion on offshore structures is one of their highest maintenance cost, researchers are working to replace steel by Fibre Reinforced Polymers (FRP), due to their immunity to corrosion. This is done in the EU H2020 funded project FIBREGY, which also seeks improving maintenance costs by incorporating Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) strategies. A critical issue in SHM is the damage detection process, which is addressed in this paper. This study aims to characterize the dynamic behaviour of an offshore windmill FRP tower, and its evolution due the presence of structural damage. This analysis will be carried out using a Finite Element Model (FEM) of the structure, and the Serial-Parallel mixing theory to characterize the material performance. A sensitivity analysis of the changes in the dynamic response of the tower (frequencies and modal shapes) produced by structural damage is carried out. This analysis will provide the optimum design variables and objective functions required by a damage detection algorithm. The algorithm is optimization based, since it converts the damage detection problem into a mathematical one, and finds the best design variables to minimize the objective function. The algorithm is also model based, as it uses the structural model to obtain the objective function for the proposed design variables. Finally, this work presents the analysis of a potential damage scenario, in order to evaluate if the damage is effectively detected.