Residual stress consideration in fatigue damage of offshore wind turbine monopiles: to be or not to be?

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the impact of residual stresses on fatigue damage of offshore wind turbine monopiles by numerical analysis approach using ABAQUS software, a finite element analysis (FEA) tool. Three monopile models with the same dimension (within standard range) have been developed in ABAQUS and partitioned circumferentially into equal rings. Longitudinal partitions have been rotated through 180° as obtainable in practice. Characteristic loads typical of a real life offshore wind turbine environment have been applied to all three models, with tensile and compressive residual stresses applied as additional loads at the critical weld region to the first and second models while the third model had no additional load. With zero boundary conditions applied in all six degrees of freedom, the simulation has been run for 107 cycles of wind and wave loads as recommended in standards in each case. Stress results obtained from the critical weld region in the three models showed that the presence of tensile residual stresses equal to the material yield stress contributed a maximum 0.05% to fatigue damage of the monopile when compared with results from the model with no residual stress while the presence of compressive residual stresses with the magnitude of the yield stress of the material caused a gain of 0.06% in fatigue life by similar comparison, indicating negligible contribution of residual stresses to the stress build up in the critical weld region, thus suggesting that the magnitude of the residual stress as high as the yield stress of the material of the monopile is not large enough to cause the monopile to open up in the axial direction