Book Description
During the past decade, the demand for clean renewable energy continues to rise drastically in Europe, the US, and other countries. Wind energy in the ocean can possibly be one of those future renewable clean energy sources as long it is economically feasible and technologically manageable. So far, most of the offshore wind farm research has been limited to fixed platforms in shallow-water areas. In the water depth deeper than 30m, however, floating-type wind farms tend to be more feasible. Then, the overall design and engineering becomes more complicated than fixed platforms including the coupled dynamics of platforms, mooring lines, and blades. In the present study, a numerical time-domain model has been developed for the fully coupled dynamic analysis of an offshore floating wind turbine system including blade-rotor dynamics and platform motions. As a test case, the TLP-type floater system with 3 blades of 70-m diameter designed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is selected to analyze the dynamic coupling effects among floating system, mooring lines, and wind turbine. The performance of the selected system in a typical wind-wave-current condition has been simulated and analyzed. A similar study for the floater and rotor coupled dynamic analysis was conducted by MIT and NREL. However, in the present case, the dynamic coupling between platform and mooring lines are also considered in addition to the rotor-floater dynamic coupling. It is seen that the rotor-floater coupling effects increase with wind velocity and blade size. The increased coupling effects tend to increase the dynamic tension of TLP tethers. The developed technology and numerical tool are applicable to the new offshore floating wind farms planned in the future.