50 Years of Load Simulation of the NREL 5MW OC4 Floating Wind Turbine

This dataset contains the post-processed results of 447073 one-hour simulations of the NREL 5MW OC4 Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) [1]. The environmental conditions are derived for an offshore site west of the island of Barra (Scotland), with the procedure described in [2]. The code used to download and process the environmental conditions is adapted from [4]. Data spans from 01-01-1972 to 31-12-2022 for a total of 51 years. Simulations are performed using the open-source code OpenFAST v3.0.0 [3]. All simulations are one hour long. For each simulation and for each load sensor in the dataset, the following quantities are computed: 

• statistics: mean, maximum and minimum value recorded, standard deviation, kurtosis and skewness of each load sensor in each simulation. 
• damage equivalent loads: one-herz, zero-mean damage equivalent loads (DELs) for each simulation and each load sensor. 3600 equivalent cycles per simulation. 128 load bins are used to rainflow count the load cycles in each simulation. 

The first six columns of each file contain: timestamp, mean wind speed intensity at 100m above sea level, significant wave height (includes wind and swell waves), peak spectral period and wind-wave misalignment,  fixed nacelle yaw error, seed used in pseudo-random windfield generator (TurbSim) and wave-field generator (HydroDyn) and IEC turbulence class. Waves are considered uni-directional. 

More information on the dataset is contained in the following paper. Please cite it if you use this dataset in your work: 
Papi F., Bianchini A.: A New Perspective on Offshore Wind Turbine Certification Using High Performance Computing, proceedings of the "Science from Making Torque from the Wind" TORQUE 2024, Firenze, 29-31 Apr. 2024, DOI 10.1088/1742-6596/2767/5/052008, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2767/5/052008

References:

[1] Jonkman J, Butterfield S, Musial W and Scott G 2009 Definition of a 5-MW Reference Wind Turbine for Offshore System Development

[2] Papi F, Perignon Y and Bianchini A 2022 Derivation of Met-Ocean Conditions for the Simulation of Floating Wind Turbines: a European case study J. Phys. Conf. Ser. 2385 012117

[3] National Renewable Energy Laboratory, OpenFAST, GitHub, https://github.com/OpenFAST/openfast/releases/tag/v3.0.0 

[4] Francesco Papi. (2023). An Open-Source Procedure to Derive Met-Ocean Conditions for the Simulation of Floating Wind Turbines (1.1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10102696