This paper documents the round robin testing campaign carried out on a floating wind turbine as part of the EU H2020 MaRINET2 project. A 1/60th scale model of a 10 MW floating platform was tested in wave basins in four different locations around Europe. The tests carried out in each facility included decay tests, tests in regular and irregular waves with and without wind thrust, and tests to characterise the mooring system as well as the model itself. For the tests in wind, only the thrust of the turbine was considered and it was fixed to pre-selected levels. Hence, this work focuses on the hydrodynamic responses of a semi-submersible floating foundation. It was found that the global surge stiffness was comparable across facilities, except in one case where different azimuth angles were used for the mooring lines. Heave and pitch had the same stiffness coefficient and periods for all basins. Response Amplitude Operators (RAOs) were used to compare the responses in waves from all facilities. The shape of the motion RAOs were globally similar for all basins except around some particular frequencies. As the results were non-linear around the resonance and cancellation frequencies, the differences between facilities were magnified at these frequencies. Surge motions were significantly impacted by reflections leading to large differences in these RAOs between all basins.

This paper introduces metrics developed for analysing irregular wave test results from the round robin testing campaign carried out on a floating wind turbine as part of the EU H2020 MaRINET2 project. A 1/60th scale model of a 10 MW floating platform was tested in wave basins in four different locations around Europe. The tests carried out in each facility included decay tests, tests in regular and irregular waves with and without wind thrust, and tests to characterise the mooring system as well as the model itself. While response amplitude operations (RAOs) are a useful tool for assessing device performance in irregular waves, they are not easy to interpret when performing an inter-facility comparison where there are many variables. Metrics that use a single value per test condition rather than an RAO curve are a means of efficiently comparing tests from different basins in a more heuristic manner. In this research, the focus is on using metrics to assess how the platform responds with varying wave height and thrust across different facilities. It is found that the metrics implemented are very useful for extracting global trends across different basins and test conditions.

Measuring accurately the shape of the free surface in medium-scale hydrodynamic testing facilities is challenging with conventional wave gauges. To overcome this problem, it is necessary to go towards higher resolution measurement systems. For this purpose, we investigate the ability of stereo-video acquisition systems to reconstruct free surface waves in laboratory conditions. This technique has been proven to give satisfactory results in open sea conditions, although it is dependent on the environmental conditions (weather, solar incidence angle). At sea, the stereo-video reconstruction algorithm makes profit of the short waves generated by the wind in order to correlate the points from the left and right images. The main challenge of adapting this technique to laboratory conditions, i.e. in absence of sun and wind, is to overcome the absence of texture on the free surface. This paper presents recent work aiming at developing a stereo-vision measurement system for laboratory conditions. Our efforts have been devoted to finding an adapted lighting system and generating a texture suitable for the reconstruction algorithm. Different lighting configurations have been tested in order to understand its impact on the reconstructions. For the texture generation, we have investigated different means of generating short surface waves (water droplets, air blowing, circulation current, underwater acoustic emissions) in different experimental facilities. Our conclusions show that it is possible to reconstruct the shape of surface gravity waves in the presence of short surface waves and that the effects of lighting and texture on the quality of the reconstruction are strongly coupled.