WISDEM Fatigue Loads Calculation

Wind & Water Computer-Aided Engineering Software Tools
1

Dear all,

I’m new to the WISDEM software, and I was wondering how fatigue loads are taken into account, if they are at all?

While exploring the codebase, I came across some function related to fatigue in the commonse.utilization_constraints module. However, I noticed that this function doesn’t seem to be called anywhere in the main workflow.

Could someone please clarify whether fatigue analysis is integrated into WISDEM’s standard design or optimization workflow? If not, is there a recommended way to incorporate fatigue considerations, or is it typically handled externally? Without using OpenFAST?

Thank you in advance for your help!

Best regards,

Adèle

2

Hi Adele,

WISDEM is a steady state code, so that assumption means fatigue cannot be directly measured or estimated as fatigue arises from dynamic load oscillation. To account for fatigue in a design loop, we usually have to rely on our WEIS tool, which marries WISDEM and OpenFAST.

There may be empirical estimates of fatigue for certain components under certain conditions. We are open to implementing something like that, or other low-fidelity approximations, if they can be appropriately generalized for WISDEM.

Cheers,
Garrett

3

Hi Garrett,

Thank you for your response — that clears things up. I’ll start working with WEIS then!

Best,
Adele