Condition-based structural health monitoring of offshore wind jacket structures: Opportunities, challenges, and perspectives

Structural health monitoring (SHM) has been recognized as a useful tool for safety management and risk reduction of offshore wind farms. In complex offshore environment, jacket structures of offshore wind turbines are prone to damages due to corrosion and fatigue. Effective SHM on jacket structures can substantially reduce their operation risk and costs. This work reviews the latest progress on the SHM of offshore wind jacket structures. The achievements in the structural damage identification, location, quantification, and remaining useful life (RUL) estimation are respectively introduced in detail, and existing challenges are discussed. Possible solutions to the challenges using the Digital Twin (DT) technology are put forward. The DT is able to mirror a real jacket structure into a virtual model, and Bayesian updating can refresh the virtual model parameters in real-time to keep consistency between virtual model and physical structure; then, just-in-time SHM can be carried out for jacket structures by performing damage detection, location, quantification, and RUL estimation using the virtual model. As a result, the DT may provide engineers and researchers a practicable tool for safety monitoring and risk reduction of fixed foundation offshore wind structures.