Abstract. The EU Horizon 2020 project COREWIND (COst REduction and increase performance of floating WIND technology) has developed two floating platforms for the new International Energy Agency (IEA) Wind 15 MW reference wind turbine. One design – “WindCrete” – is a spar floater, and the other – “Activefloat” – is a semi-submersible floater; both designs are made of concrete. In this work the design of the floaters is introduced with their aero–hydro–servo-elastic numerical models, and the responses of both floaters in both static and dynamic simulations are investigated. The static displacements and natural frequencies are simulated and discussed. Additionally, the effects of the mean wave drift forces and second-order difference-frequency wave forces on the systems' responses are presented. The increase in the turbine's power capacity to 15 MW in IEA Wind model leads to an increase in inertial forces and aerodynamic thrust force when compared to similar floating platforms coupled to the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) 10 MW reference model. The goal of this work is to investigate the floaters' responses for different load cases. The results in this paper suggest that at mild wave loads the motion responses of the 15 MW floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) are dominated by low-frequency forces. Therefore, motions are dominated by the wind forces and second-order wave forces rather than the first-order wave forces. After assessing and understanding the models' responses, the two 15 MW FOWT numerical reference models are publicly available to be used in the research and development of floating wind energy.

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The aerodynamical design of backward swept for a horizontal axis wind turbine blade has been carried out to produce more power at higher wind velocities. The backward sweep is added by tilting the blade toward the air flow direction. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) calculations were used for solving the conservation equations in one outer stationary reference frame and one inner rotating reference frame, where the blades and grids were fixed in reference to the rotating frame. The blade structure was validated using Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) solver in a test case by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) VI blades results. Simulation results show considerable agreement with the NREL measurements. Standard K-ε turbulence model was chosen for simulations and for the backward swept design process. A sample backward sweep design was applied to the blades of a Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) rotor, and it is obtained that although at the lower wind velocities the output power and the axial thrust of the rotor decrease, at the higher wind velocities the output power increases while the axial thrust decreases. The swept blades have shown about 30 percent increase in output power and about 12 percent decrease in thrust at the wind speed of 14 m/s.