Hydrodynamic Analysis of the WIND-Bos Spar Floating Offshore Wind Turbine

Abstract

The WIND-bos spar Floating Offshore Wind Turbine is studied both experimentally and numerically. The experimental model of the moored WIND-bos platform is presented, and the different numerical models that have been developed to analyze the hydrodynamics of the platform are described. The results provide a detailed comparison of numerical and experimental motion responses of the floating structure in regular and irregular waves. The numerical study includes frequency domain results from spectral analysis, weakly nonlinear time-domain results from a validated in-house code, and coupled time-domain results from commercial software. The importance of damping calibration is put in evidence, whereas damping ratios are calculated iteratively in the coupled time-domain simulations, and nonlinear damping force is considered within the developed numerical scheme. The results compare well and also show that the novel concept has a good motion performance in general.

Keywords

• wind energy
• spar
• floating offshore wind turbine
• coupled analysis
• numerical-experimental comparison