To address the limitations that the traditional fatigue design for wind turbine towers using deterministic S-N curves might not accurately quantify fatigue life dispersion, a probabilistic fatigue life prediction method was proposed based on physics-informed neural networks. By embedding the physical prior knowledge such as fatigue life dispersion, monotonicity and nonlinearity into the neural networks, a probabilistic prediction model capable of accurately quantifying uncertainty was constructed. Compared with traditional methods, the proposed method reduces the normalized root mean square error(NRMSE) by up to 31.58%. A 16 MW wind turbine simulation model was established in accordance with IEC standards, and tower load data were obtained by using Bladed software. Combined with wind-speed distribution, rain flow counting and the Miner rule, the probabilistic fatigue life prediction of the towers was achieved. The results show that the proposed method effectively characterizes the probabilistic features of fatigue damages, and the tower lifetime varies significantly with reliability requirements (shortening from 83.3 years at 50% probability to 18.2 years at 99.9% probability), which provides a reliable basis for probabilistic fatigue design and safety assessment of wind turbine towers.
为验证所提物理信息神经网络方法对疲劳不确定性量化的有效性,利用7-series铝合金[13]和高强度钢丝[14]两种不同金属材料的实际疲劳测试数据,将本文方法与MLE和BNN两种方法进行了对比测试。上述过程采用拟合优度R2与归一化均方根误差(normalized root mean square error,NRMSE)作为评价指标在测试集上完成性能验证。对比汇总结果见表1,表格内的加粗数据代表方法结果优异。
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