Development of a fully coupled aero-hydro-mooring-elastic tool for floating offshore wind turbines

Abstract

A floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) is a coupled system where a wind turbine with flexible blades interacts with a moored platform in wind and waves. This paper presents a high-fidelity aero-hydro-mooring-elastic analysis tool developed for FOWT applications. A fully coupled analysis is carried out for an OC4 semi-submersible FOWT under a combined wind/wave condition. Responses of the FOWT are investigated in terms of platform hydrodynamics, mooring dynamics, wind turbine aerodynamics and blade structural dynamics. Interactions between the FOWT and fluid flow are also analysed by visualising results obtained via the CFD approach. Through this work, the capabilities of the tool developed are demonstrated and impacts of different parts of the system on each other are investigated.

A Review of Numerical and Physical Methods for Analyzing the Coupled Hydro–Aero–Structural Dynamics of Floating Wind Turbine Systems

“…These models consider that the mooring is in the balance between the anchor and the FWTS attachment point [30]. Additionally, the dynamic effects, such as inertia, hydrodynamic drag force, and vortex shedding, are not considered [79,94,[206][207][208][209].…”

A Review of SPH Techniques for Hydrodynamic Simulations of Ocean Energy Devices

“…For instance, the open-source solver MoorDyn has been coupled with the WEC-Sim package (an open-source BE solver based on Matlab) as its mooring module [175]. Another typical example is the OpenFoam solver, which has been further developed by several researchers by integrating in-house mooring modules for the simulations of several traditional ocean engineering structures (see, e.g., [176][177][178][179]), and OEDs such as FWTs as well (see, e.g., [180,181]). However, to the best knowledge of the authors, these existing open-source solvers still lack the ability to cope with an arbitrary number of jointed objects.…”

Numerical Modelling of a Floating Wind Turbine Semi-Submersible Platform

“…Moreover, the study of this type of platforms has been extended in recent years, with several studies focused on decay testing for different degrees of freedom [11,21]. Tran et al [19,22] studied the unsteady aerodynamics of a turbine by imposing a sine function onto a spar platform. In recent years, various articles have been focusing on the complex behaviour of these structures.…”

“…In recent years, various articles have been focusing on the complex behaviour of these structures. Liu et al [22] studied the effects of the movement of the OC4 DeepCWind platform on the aerodynamics of the wind turbine and vice versa [23], work that continued with the development of an aero-hydro-mooring elastic fully coupled tool by inducing a combined wind and wave condition.…”

“…Following their work, Tran and Kim [22] investigated a 5MW wind turbine over an OC4 DeepCWind semi-submersible platform by comparing the results of the dynamic fluid body interaction methodology with those obtained with the open-source software FAST. The aero-hydrodynamic performance of the system was studied under coupled wind-wave conditions and in decay testing [24].…”