Effect of Platform Surge Motion on the Performance of 5MW NREL Offshore Floating Wind Turbine

Abstract

In this study, an unsteady aerodynamic simulation is performed to realize the influences of platform surge motion on the aerodynamic performance of a high capacity offshore floating wind turbine. A dynamic model with pitch angle control system is utilized to propose a more realistic model of wind turbine and also achieve the rated condition of the rotor. The transient effect of platform surge motion on power coefficient, thrust coefficient and blade pitch angle also is investigated. The 5 MW NREL wind turbine is selected for the simulations. The unsteady aerodynamic model contains unsteady blade element momentum method, dynamic stall and dynamic inflow models. The in-home aerodynamic code and the control system model are implemented in MATLAB/SIMULINK software. It is revealed that reduction in mean power coefficient at tip speed ratios less that 7 is expected by amount of 12-15 % at surge amplitude of 2m and frequency of 0.1 Hz. For high tip speed ratios, the trend is reverse with respect to fixed-platform case. The mean thrust coefficient is also reduced for many tip speed ratios with maximum loss of 32 %. The mean blade control pitch angle is increased due to the surge motion. Since the influence of changing amplitude and frequency of disturbances depends on the tip speed ratio, therefore the special bound of this parameter is being proposed.

Keywords

• offshore floating wind turbine
• pitch angle control system
• platform surge motion
• unsteady aerodynamic