Probabilistic surrogate modeling of damage equivalent loads on onshore and offshore wind turbines using mixture density networks

Abstract. The use of load surrogates in offshore wind turbine site assessment has gained attention as a way to speed up the lengthy and costly siting process. We propose a novel probabilistic approach using mixture density networks to map 10-minute average site conditions to the corresponding load statistics. The probabilistic framework allows for the modeling of the uncertainty in the loads as a response to the stochastic inflow conditions. We train the data-driven model on the OpenFAST simulations of the IEA-10MW-RWT and compare the predictions to the widely used Gaussian process regression. We show that mixture density networks can recover the accurate mean response in all load channels with values for the coefficient of determination (R²) greater than 0.95 on the test dataset. Mixture density networks completely outperform Gaussian process regression in predicting the quantiles, showing an excellent agreement with the reference. We compare onshore and offshore sites for training to conclude the need for a more extensive training dataset in offshore cases due to the larger feature space and more noise in the data.