Objective To address the effects of time-varying corrosion on offshore wind turbines (OWTs), a structural response prediction method incorporating corrosion-induced deterioration is proposed.

Method A time-varying corrosion equivalent model is developed to account for structural geometric damage and material property degradation, enabling dynamic updating of the structural mechanical performance. Combined with CFD simulations, a high-fidelity structural response database covering the entire service life of OWTs is constructed to investigate the time-varying structural deterioration mechanism. The nonlinear relationship between structural response distributions and time-varying corrosion damage is characterized. Furthermore, an interpolation and deduction algorithm is introduced to supplement uncalculated data, enabling rapid and accurate prediction of key structural response parameters.

Results The results show that the proposed time-varying corrosion equivalent model can effectively capture the degradation of structural performance and enable rapid corrosion modeling of OWT structures. The structural response database established using CFD simulations can reveal the evolution characteristics of structural responses. Error analysis of different sampling strategies indicates that the dense sampling strategy achieves stress and deformation prediction errors of 0.31% and 2.23%, respectively, while the moderate sampling strategy also maintains satisfactory predictive accuracy. Although the errors associated with the sparse sampling strategy increase to 3.31% and 8.71%, the overall evolution trends of the structural responses are still accurately captured.

Conclusion The proposed prediction method can quickly and effectively characterized the nonlinear relationship between structural response characteristics and corrosion damage evolution in OWTs. It provides technical support for structural design optimization, long-term performance assessment, and operation and maintenance decision-making of OWT structures.