Structural Offshore Wind Turbines Optimization

Offshore Wind Turbine (OWT) requires demanding and costly support structures. The conception, the design and the assessment of this kind of construction must consider several interacting and controversial aspects: there is a harsh design environment, relatively wide spectrum functional requirements, and exceptional scenarios. In fact, different aspects and various performances under several load conditions have to be investigated for this type of structures. This paper shows an optimization process related to the preliminary design of support structures for an OWT farm projected in the Mediterranean Sea showing the decision criteria considered. A strutted scheme is introduced and optimized with main reference to Ultimate Limit States (ULS) to obtain a baseline design.