Development and Verification of a Fully Coupled Simulator for Offshore Wind Turbines

TLDR

The vast deepwater wind resource offers potential for floating offshore wind turbines, but comprehensive simulation tools that couple wind, aerodynamics, structural dynamics, controls, waves, currents, and hydrodynamics are essential for design and analysis. The study develops a fully coupled analysis tool for floating offshore wind turbines, adding a quasi‑static mooring module. The simulator, built to overcome limitations of prior frequency and time‑domain studies, is versatile across turbine, platform, and mooring configurations and was validated through model‑to‑model comparisons. Verification exercises confirm the simulator’s accuracy and reveal potential design challenges illustrated by sample response simulations.

Abstract

†‡ The vast deepwater wind resource represents a potential to use floating offshore wind turbines to power much of the world with renewable energy. Comprehensive simulation tools that account for the coupled excitation and response of the complete system, including the influences of wind-inflow, aerodynamics, structural dynamics, controls, and, for offshore systems, waves, currents, and hydrodynamics, are used to design and analyze wind turbines. Continuing our work presented previously, we outline the development of such an analysis tool for floating offshore wind turbines, including a recently added, quasi-static mooring system module. The fully coupled simulator was developed with enough sophistication to address the limitations of previous frequency and time domain studies and to have the features required to perform an integrated loads analysis. It is also universal enough to analyze a variety of wind turbine, support platform, and mooring system configurations. The simulation capability was tested by model-to-model comparisons to ensure its correctness. The results of all of the verification exercises are favorable and give us confidence to pursue more thorough investigations into the behavior of floating offshore wind turbines. Some of the potential challenges to their design are highlighted through sample response simulations.