FLOAT: Fatigue-Aware Design Optimization of Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Towers
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| author | Ribeiro, João Alves Pimenta, Francisco Ribeiro, Bruno Alves Tavares, Sérgio M. O. Ahmed, Faez |
| author_facet | Ribeiro, João Alves Pimenta, Francisco Ribeiro, Bruno Alves Tavares, Sérgio M. O. Ahmed, Faez |
| contents | Upscaling is central to offshore wind's cost-reduction strategy, with increasingly large rotors and nacelles requiring taller and stronger towers. In Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs), this trend amplifies fatigue loads due to coupled wind-wave dynamics and platform motion. Conventional fatigue evaluation requires millions of high-fidelity simulations, creating prohibitive computational costs and slowing design innovation. This paper presents FLOAT (Fatigue-aware Lightweight Optimization and Analysis for Towers), a framework that accelerates fatigue-aware tower design. It integrates three key contributions: a lightweight fatigue estimation method that enables efficient optimization, a Monte Carlo-based probabilistic wind-wave sampling approach that reduces required simulations, and enhanced high-fidelity modeling through pitch/heave-platform calibration and High-Performance Computing execution. The framework is applied to the IEA 22 MW FOWT tower, delivering, to the authors' knowledge, the first fatigue-oriented redesign of this benchmark model: FLOAT 22 MW FOWT tower. Validation against 6,468 simulations shows that the optimized tower extends the estimated fatigue life from 9 months to 25 years while avoiding resonance, and that the lightweight fatigue estimator provides conservative predictions with a mean relative error of -8.6%. Achieving this lifetime requires increased tower mass, yielding the lowest-mass fatigue-compliant design. All results and the reported lifetime extension are obtained within the considered fatigue scope (DLC 1.2, aligned wind-wave conditions). By reducing simulation requirements by orders of magnitude, FLOAT enables reliable and scalable tower design for next-generation FOWTs, bridging industrial needs and academic research while generating high-fidelity datasets that can support data-driven and AI-assisted design methodologies. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_01657 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | FLOAT: Fatigue-Aware Design Optimization of Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Towers Ribeiro, João Alves Pimenta, Francisco Ribeiro, Bruno Alves Tavares, Sérgio M. O. Ahmed, Faez Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science 74A45, 74P05 I.6.8; G.1.6; C.4 Upscaling is central to offshore wind's cost-reduction strategy, with increasingly large rotors and nacelles requiring taller and stronger towers. In Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs), this trend amplifies fatigue loads due to coupled wind-wave dynamics and platform motion. Conventional fatigue evaluation requires millions of high-fidelity simulations, creating prohibitive computational costs and slowing design innovation. This paper presents FLOAT (Fatigue-aware Lightweight Optimization and Analysis for Towers), a framework that accelerates fatigue-aware tower design. It integrates three key contributions: a lightweight fatigue estimation method that enables efficient optimization, a Monte Carlo-based probabilistic wind-wave sampling approach that reduces required simulations, and enhanced high-fidelity modeling through pitch/heave-platform calibration and High-Performance Computing execution. The framework is applied to the IEA 22 MW FOWT tower, delivering, to the authors' knowledge, the first fatigue-oriented redesign of this benchmark model: FLOAT 22 MW FOWT tower. Validation against 6,468 simulations shows that the optimized tower extends the estimated fatigue life from 9 months to 25 years while avoiding resonance, and that the lightweight fatigue estimator provides conservative predictions with a mean relative error of -8.6%. Achieving this lifetime requires increased tower mass, yielding the lowest-mass fatigue-compliant design. All results and the reported lifetime extension are obtained within the considered fatigue scope (DLC 1.2, aligned wind-wave conditions). By reducing simulation requirements by orders of magnitude, FLOAT enables reliable and scalable tower design for next-generation FOWTs, bridging industrial needs and academic research while generating high-fidelity datasets that can support data-driven and AI-assisted design methodologies. |
| title | FLOAT: Fatigue-Aware Design Optimization of Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Towers |
| topic | Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science 74A45, 74P05 I.6.8; G.1.6; C.4 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01657 |