1 Pareto distribution for extreme loads on wind turbines

Abstract: Extreme loads from 50-years wind and gusts play an important role in the design of wind turbines. Normally these loads are derived from simulated time series by identifying the absolute extreme values, leaving a high amount of uncertainty and chance in these design parameters. Here we describe a method to determine statistically well founded extreme loads on the basis of the extreme value theory. Analyzing tower loads, we find that the extreme values of a given load component are described by a Pareto distribution, and non-correlated simultaneous components are normally distributed. Utilizing the peak-over-threshold method we obtain the optimal parameters of the Pareto distribution with the help of the maximum-likelihood estimation