We present a framework for reducing the cost of support structures for offshore wind turbines that takes into account the many uncertainties that go into the design process. The results demonstrate how an efficient new approach, tailored for support structure design, allows the state of the art for design without uncertainties to be used within a framework that does include these uncertainties. This allows more realistic, and less conservative, design methods to be used for practical design.

This study was done in order to simplify the analysis needed for the assessment of safety criteria that offshore wind turbine support structures must satisfy. The work was done via simulations of the system and computations and analyses of the resulting data. The results show that the proposed methodology has great potential for simplifying the assessment procedure while retaining acceptable accuracy compared to the full analysis. There are several applications within both research and industry.