scholarly journals Numerical Study of a Proposed Semi-Submersible Floating Platform with Different Numbers of Offset Columns Based on the DeepCwind Prototype for Improving the Wave-Resistance Ability

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 1255
Author(s):  
Zhenqing Liu ◽  
Yicheng Fan ◽  
Wei Wang ◽  
Guowei Qian

DeepCwind semi-submersible floating offshore wind turbines have been widely examined, and in some countries this type of floating offshore wind turbine has been adopted in the construction of floating wind farms. However, the DeepCwind semi-submersible floating offshore wind turbines still experience large surge motion that limits their operational time. Therefore, in this study, a semi-submersible floating platform with different numbers of offset columns, but with the same total weight, based on the DeepCwind prototype is proposed. From the free-decay test, it was found that the number of the floating columns will affect the natural frequency of the platform. Furthermore, the regular wave test in the time domain and the irregular wave test in the frequency domain show that increasing the number of the floating columns will reduce the surge motion greatly, while the effects in the heave and pitch motions are not obvious.

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 1134
Author(s):  
Tobi Elusakin ◽  
Mahmood Shafiee ◽  
Tosin Adedipe ◽  
Fateme Dinmohammadi

With increasing deployment of offshore wind farms further from shore and in deeper waters, the efficient and effective planning of operation and maintenance (O&M) activities has received considerable attention from wind energy developers and operators in recent years. The O&M planning of offshore wind farms is a complicated task, as it depends on many factors such as asset degradation rates, availability of resources required to perform maintenance tasks (e.g., transport vessels, service crew, spare parts, and special tools) as well as the uncertainties associated with weather and climate variability. A brief review of the literature shows that a lot of research has been conducted on optimizing the O&M schedules for fixed-bottom offshore wind turbines; however, the literature for O&M planning of floating wind farms is too limited. This paper presents a stochastic Petri network (SPN) model for O&M planning of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) and their support structure components, including floating platform, moorings and anchoring system. The proposed model incorporates all interrelationships between different factors influencing O&M planning of FOWTs, including deterioration and renewal process of components within the system. Relevant data such as failure rate, mean-time-to-failure (MTTF), degradation rate, etc. are collected from the literature as well as wind energy industry databases, and then the model is tested on an NREL 5 MW reference wind turbine system mounted on an OC3-Hywind spar buoy floating platform. The results indicate that our proposed model can significantly contribute to the reduction of O&M costs in the floating offshore wind sector.


Author(s):  
Yang Huang ◽  
Decheng Wan

Abstract To investigate the influence of the inter-turbine spacing on the performance of the floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) in the floating wind farm, coupled aero-hydrodynamic simulations of two spar-type FOWT models with inter-turbine spacing variation under shear wind and regular wave conditions are performed in the present work. An unsteady actuator line model (UALM) is embedded into in-house code naoe-FOAM-SJTU to establish a fully coupled CFD analysis tool for numerical simulations of FOWTs. From the simulation results, the unsteady aerodynamic power and thrust are obtained, and the hydrodynamic responses including the six-degree-of-freedom motions and mooring tensions are available. Detailed flow visualizations of wake velocity profiles and vortex structures are also illustrated. The coupled performance of floating offshore wind turbines with inter-turbine spacing variation are analyzed, and the influences of inter-turbine spacing on aero-hydrodynamic characteristics of coupled wind-wave flow field are discussed. It is found that the power output of downstream wind turbine increases with inter-turbine spacing. Coupled aero-hydrodynamic characteristics of flow filed are significantly affected by inter-turbine spacing.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 543
Author(s):  
Jiawen Li ◽  
Jingyu Bian ◽  
Yuxiang Ma ◽  
Yichen Jiang

A typhoon is a restrictive factor in the development of floating wind power in China. However, the influences of multistage typhoon wind and waves on offshore wind turbines have not yet been studied. Based on Typhoon Mangkhut, in this study, the characteristics of the motion response and structural loads of an offshore wind turbine are investigated during the travel process. For this purpose, a framework is established and verified for investigating the typhoon-induced effects of offshore wind turbines, including a multistage typhoon wave field and a coupled dynamic model of offshore wind turbines. On this basis, the motion response and structural loads of different stages are calculated and analyzed systematically. The results show that the maximum response does not exactly correspond to the maximum wave or wind stage. Considering only the maximum wave height or wind speed may underestimate the motion response during the traveling process of the typhoon, which has problems in guiding the anti-typhoon design of offshore wind turbines. In addition, the coupling motion between the floating foundation and turbine should be considered in the safety evaluation of the floating offshore wind turbine under typhoon conditions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (24) ◽  
pp. 11665
Author(s):  
Shi Liu ◽  
Yi Yang ◽  
Chao Wang ◽  
Yuangang Tu

Spar-type floating offshore wind turbines commonly vibrate excessively when under the coupling impact of wind and wave. The wind turbine vibration can be controlled by developing its mooring system. Thus, this study proposes a novel mooring system for the spar-type floating offshore wind turbine. The proposed mooring system has six mooring lines, which are divided into three groups, with two mooring lines in the same group being connected to the same fairlead. Subsequently, the effects of the included angle between the two mooring lines on the mooring-system’s performance are investigated. Then, these six mooring lines are connected to six independent fairleads for comparison. FAST is utilized to calculate wind turbine dynamic response. Wind turbine surge, pitch, and yaw movements are presented and analyzed in time and frequency domains to quantitatively evaluate the performances of the proposed mooring systems. Compared with the mooring system with six fairleads, the mooring system with three fairleads performed better. When the included angle was 40°, surge, pitch, and yaw movement amplitudes of the wind turbine reduced by 39.51%, 6.8%, and 12.34%, respectively, when under regular waves; they reduced by 56.08%, 25.00%, and 47.5%, respectively, when under irregular waves. Thus, the mooring system with three fairleads and 40° included angle is recommended.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 859
Author(s):  
Thanh-Dam Pham ◽  
Hyunkyoung Shin

Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) have been installed in Europe and Japan with relatively modern technology. The installation of floating wind farms in deep water is recommended because the wind speed is stronger and more stable. The design of the FOWT must ensure it is able to withstand complex environmental conditions including wind, wave, current, and performance of the wind turbine. It needs simulation tools with fully integrated hydrodynamic-servo-elastic modeling capabilities for the floating offshore wind turbines. Most of the numerical simulation approaches consider only first-order hydrodynamic loads; however, the second-order hydrodynamic loads have an effect on a floating platform which is moored by a catenary mooring system. At the difference-frequencies of the incident wave components, the drift motion of a FOWT system is able to have large oscillation around its natural frequency. This paper presents the effects of second-order wave loads to the drift motion of a semi-submersible type. This work also aimed to validate the hydrodynamic model of Ulsan University (UOU) in-house codes through numerical simulations and model tests. The NREL FAST code was used for the fully coupled simulation, and in-house codes of UOU generates hydrodynamic coefficients as the input for the FAST code. The model test was performed in the water tank of UOU.


Author(s):  
P. Agarwal ◽  
L. Manuel

In the design of wind turbines—onshore or offshore—the prediction of extreme loads associated with a target return period requires statistical extrapolation from available loads data. The data required for such extrapolation are obtained by stochastic time-domain simulation of the inflow turbulence, the incident waves, and the turbine response. Prediction of accurate loads depends on assumptions made in the simulation models employed. While for the wind, inflow turbulence models are relatively well established, for wave input, the current practice is to model irregular (random) waves using a linear wave theory. Such a wave model does not adequately represent waves in shallow waters where most offshore wind turbines are being sited. As an alternative to this less realistic wave model, the present study investigates the use of irregular nonlinear (second-order) waves for estimating loads on an offshore wind turbine, with a focus on the fore-aft tower bending moment at the mudline. We use a 5MW utility-scale wind turbine model for the simulations. Using, first, simpler linear irregular wave modeling assumptions, we establish long-term loads and identify governing environmental conditions (i.e., the wind speed and wave height) that are associated with the 20-year return period load derived using the inverse first-order reliability method. We present the nonlinear irregular wave model next and incorporate it into an integrated wind-wave-response simulation analysis program for offshore wind turbines. We compute turbine loads for the governing environmental conditions identified with the linear model and also for an extreme environmental state. We show that computed loads are generally larger with the nonlinear wave modeling assumptions; this establishes the importance of using such refined nonlinear wave models in stochastic simulation of the response of offshore wind turbines.


Author(s):  
Yajun Ren ◽  
Vengatesan Venugopal

Abstract The complex dynamic characteristics of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs) have raised wider consideration, as they are likely to experience harsher environments and higher instabilities than the bottom fixed offshore wind turbines. Safer design of a mooring system is critical for floating offshore wind turbine structures for station keeping. Failure of mooring lines may lead to further destruction, such as significant changes to the platform’s location and possible collisions with a neighbouring platform and eventually complete loss of the turbine structure may occur. The present study focuses on the dynamic responses of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)’s OC3-Hywind spar type floating platform with a NREL offshore 5-MW baseline wind turbine under failed mooring conditions using the fully coupled numerical simulation tool FAST. The platform motions in surge, heave and pitch under multiple scenarios are calculated in time-domain. The results describing the FOWT motions in the form of response amplitude operators (RAOs) and spectral densities are presented and discussed in detail. The results indicate that the loss of the mooring system firstly leads to longdistance drift and changes in platform motions. The natural frequencies and the energy contents of the platform motion, the RAOs of the floating structures are affected by the mooring failure to different degrees.


Author(s):  
Daniel Milano ◽  
Christophe Peyrard ◽  
Matteo Capaldo

Abstract The numerical fatigue analysis of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) must account for the environmental loading over a typical design life of 25 years, and the stochastic nature of wind and waves is represented by design load cases (DLCs). In this statistical approach, combinations of wind speeds and directions are associated with different sea states, commonly defined via simplified wave spectra (Pierson-Moskowitz, JONSWAP), and their probability of occurrence is identified based on past observations. However, little is known about the difference between discretizing the wind/wave direction bins into (e.g.) 10deg bins rather than 30deg bins, and the impact it has on FOWT analyses. In addition, there is an interest in identifying the parameters that best represent real sea states (significant wave height, peak period) and wind fields (profile, turbulence) in lumped load cases. In this context, the aim of this work is to better understand the uncertainties associated to wind/wave direction bin size and to the use of metocean parameters as opposed to real wind and sea state conditions. A computational model was developed in order to couple offshore wind turbine models with realistic numerical metocean models, referred to as numerical prototype due to the highly realistic wind/wave conditions in which it operates. This method allows the virtual installation of FOWTs anywhere within a considered spatial domain (e.g. the Mediterranean Sea or the North Sea) and their behaviour to be evaluated in measured wind and modelled wave conditions. The work presented in this paper compares the long-term dynamic behaviour of a tension-leg platform (TLP) FOWT design subject to the numerical prototype and to lumped load cases with different direction bin sizes. Different approaches to representing the wind filed are also investigated, and the modelling choices that have the greatest impact on the fidelity of lumped load cases are identified. The fatigue analysis suggests that 30deg direction bins are sufficient to reliably represent long-term wind/wave conditions, while the use of a constant surface roughness length (as suggested by the IEC standards) seems to significantly overestimate the cumulated damage on the tower of the FOWT.


Author(s):  
Xiaohong Chen ◽  
Qing Yu

This paper presents the research in support of the development of design requirements for floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs). An overview of technical challenges in the design of FOWTs is discussed, followed by a summary of the case studies using representative FOWT concepts. Three design concepts, including a Spar-type, a TLP-type and a Semisubmersible-type floating support structure carrying a 5-MW offshore wind turbine, are selected for the case studies. Both operational and extreme storm conditions on the US Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) are considered. A state-of-the-art simulation technique is employed to perform fully coupled aero-hydro-servo-elastic analysis using the integrated FOWT model. This technique can take into account dynamic interactions among the turbine Rotor-Nacelle Assembly (RNA), turbine control system, floating support structure and stationkeeping system. The relative importance of various design parameters and their impact on the development of design criteria are evaluated through parametric analyses. The paper also introduces the design requirements put forward in the recently published ABS Guide for Building and Classing Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Installations (ABS, 2013).


Author(s):  
Knut O. Ronold ◽  
Vigleik L. Hansen ◽  
Marte Godvik ◽  
Einar Landet ◽  
Erik R. Jo̸rgensen ◽  
...  

Floating offshore wind turbines is a field undergoing major development. Several companies and research institutes worldwide are engaged in research programs, pilot projects and even planning of commercial floating wind farms. Developing standards for design of floating wind turbine structures and a framework for prevailing rules are crucial and necessary for the industry to continue to grow. Det Norske Veritas (DNV) is an international provider of offshore standards for both the oil and gas industry and the wind energy industry. The standard DNV-OS-J101 “Design of Offshore Wind Turbine Structures” provides principles, technical requirements and guidance for design, construction and in-service inspection of offshore wind turbine structures. As a first step towards updating this standard to fully cover floating wind turbine structures, a DNV Guideline for Offshore Floating Wind Turbines has been established. This development is based on identification of current floating wind turbine concepts and the guideline includes an evaluation of what is required to make DNV-OS-J101 suitable for floating wind turbine structures. This paper presents the highlights of the new DNV Guideline for Offshore Floating Wind Turbine Structures.


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