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Abstract Offshore renewable energy, derived from wind and waves, is increasingly being considered in many regions of the world. Co-location of offshore wind turbine (OWT) and wave energy converter (WEC) arrays allows the shared use of space and offers beneficial interaction, leading to efficient utilization of marine resources and more sustainable ocean energy solutions. By extracting energy from waves, WECs can offer sheltering effects and reduced hydrodynamic loads on downstream OWTs. This can enhance the structural reliability of the OWTs against fatigue and extend the service life. To quantify such extension in service life, a comprehensive reliability analysis framework is proposed that incorporates metocean data analysis, fatigue damage assessment, and an integrated reliability-based fatigue life estimation. We employ power-take-off matrices of different WEC devices to approximate absorbed wave power in irregular sea states. A metocean data analysis establishes the representative sea states for the incident and lee waves, where lee wave conditions are estimated by subtracting WEC absorbed power absorption from the incident power. The open-source time-domain simulation tool, OpenFAST, is employed to compute motions and loads on a downstream floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT), for sea states of interest. Fatigue damage assessment and associated life estimation are carried using a selected output stress response. An extended service life due to effective sheltering for the FOWT can be evaluated through the proposed fatigue reliability-based analysis that includes uncertainties from metocean conditions. By comparing three different types of WEC devices, the analysis showed a 14% to 25 % extension in service life can be achieved.
Liu et al. (Sun,) studied this question.