Development of design typhoon profile for offshore wind turbine foundation design in Southern China

For offshore wind development in Southern China, typhoon represents the extreme environmental loading condition to be considered in the design of the turbine structures. For the geotechnical design of the foundations, it is specified by the design code that the effect of cyclic loading on the soil strength and stiffness must be considered. This necessitates the complete time history of loads on the foundation experienced during a design typhoon. Idealised storm profiles with staged mean wind speeds and significant wave heights are commonly used as input to time-domain simulations to generate the foundation load history. However, no such design typhoon profile is provided in the Chinese design standard which creates considerable difficulty and uncertainty in the design process. In this paper, the methodology and the rationale that were applied to derive the design typhoon profiles for an offshore wind project in Guangdong province are presented. The wind and wave characteristics generated by typhoon are described in detail and the implications for the foundation design are discussed. To demonstrate application of the proposed typhoon profile, a case study for the ULS design of a suction bucket jacket is presented.