Holistic seismic risk assessment of deteriorating offshore wind turbines considering global warming

Aging-affected and deteriorating structural elements negatively influence the load-bearing capacity and fragility of offshore wind turbines (OWTs) under earthquake and environmental loads.

Increasing ocean temperature and ocean acidification due to climate change exacerbate these impacts, highlighting the need for careful consideration for OWTs against seismic and environmental loads.

On the other hand, the recent installation of OWTs in seismic active areas (e.g., U.S. and Italy) and the use of modern larger turbines that are more vulnerable to earthquakes necessitate seismic reliability analysis of deteriorating OWTs.

The overall objective of this research is to develop a loss estimation method for OWTs in a multi-hazard risk modeling framework, by advancing current state-of-the-art practices in performance-based earthquake engineering.

Through this Postdoctoral Fellowship (P.F.), my goal is to develop a comprehensive probabilistic framework to assess the fragility and risk of OWTs exposed to multiple hazards including environmental and/or earthquake hazards, aging impacts, and global warming due to climate change. Risk and resilience metrics are estimated in terms of financial (monetary) loss.

This goal will be achieved through (1) the development of probabilistic models for time-dependent corrosion deterioration processes considering global warming, (2) environmental (wind and wave) and seismic hazards estimation, (3) OWTs structural modeling and analysis and development of surrogate models to obtain the structural response, and (4) fragility analysis and consequence modeling through estimation of risk metrics.