Hydrodynamic and Aerodynamic Loads on the Behaviour of Offshore Wind Farm

Author(s):  
Wei Gong

Renewable energy provides a solution for complex current and future social and environmental problems whereas offshore industry has a large potential for providing renewable energy for future. Currently, offshore technology making use of wind for energy generation purpose becomes a hot spot with highly advanced research and development going on on one side and complex and critical problems present and difficult to solve on the other. This paper is trying to study problems related to the quantification of the hydrodynamic and aerodynamic loads for the design of offshore wind turbine support structures in the offshore wind farm. Both the hydrodynamic and aerodynamic conditions in the offshore site are extremely complex resulting in the difficulty of reasonable determination for the external loads on the wind turbine support structures. However, due to the increasing global demands for future energy solution, the design, analysis and optimization of offshore wind turbine is nevertheless an important issue. The paper first gives an introduction of the offshore wind farm and the complexity of the offshore environment. Wave load is explored with introduction of existing wave load models, comparison of their characteristics while the focus is placed on the nonlinear wave load by means of the Stokes higher order wave theory. Properties of a single regular wave based on methods of linear wave theory and Stokes higher order wave theory are compared which lead to differences in the results of wave load models when these two different methods are used. Wind load model is introduced briefly, followed by the introduction of current methods for determination or approximation of combined wave and wind load and also recommendations for practice. Park effect of the wind load and wave load is also introduced at limited depth in the latter stage as a direction for future research. Conclusion and recommendations based on all the above are therefore given at the last section of the paper.

Author(s):  
Yougang Tang ◽  
Jun Hu ◽  
Liqin Liu

The wind resources for ocean power generation are mostly distributed in sea areas with the distance of 5–50km from coastline, whose water depth are generally over 20m. To improve ocean power output and economic benefit of offshore wind farm, it is necessary to choose floating foundation for offshore wind turbine. According to the basic data of a 600kW wind turbine with a horizontal shaft, the tower, semi-submersible foundation and mooring system are designed in the 60-meter-deep sea area. Precise finite element models of the floating wind turbine system are established, including mooring lines, floating foundation, tower and wind turbine. Dynamic responses for the floating foundation of offshore wind turbine are investigated under wave load in frequency domain.


Author(s):  
Bryan Nelson ◽  
Yann Quéméner

This study evaluated, by time-domain simulations, the fatigue lives of several jacket support structures for 4 MW wind turbines distributed throughout an offshore wind farm off Taiwan’s west coast. An in-house RANS-based wind farm analysis tool, WiFa3D, has been developed to determine the effects of the wind turbine wake behaviour on the flow fields through wind farm clusters. To reduce computational cost, WiFa3D employs actuator disk models to simulate the body forces imposed on the flow field by the target wind turbines, where the actuator disk is defined by the swept region of the rotor in space, and a body force distribution representing the aerodynamic characteristics of the rotor is assigned within this virtual disk. Simulations were performed for a range of environmental conditions, which were then combined with preliminary site survey metocean data to produce a long-term statistical environment. The short-term environmental loads on the wind turbine rotors were calculated by an unsteady blade element momentum (BEM) model of the target 4 MW wind turbines. The fatigue assessment of the jacket support structure was then conducted by applying the Rainflow Counting scheme on the hot spot stresses variations, as read-out from Finite Element results, and by employing appropriate SN curves. The fatigue lives of several wind turbine support structures taken at various locations in the wind farm showed significant variations with the preliminary design condition that assumed a single wind turbine without wake disturbance from other units.


2015 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 406-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Shi ◽  
Jonghoon Han ◽  
Changwan Kim ◽  
Daeyong Lee ◽  
Hyunkyoung Shin ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 455-468
Author(s):  
Xie Lubing ◽  
Rui Xiaoming ◽  
Li Shuai ◽  
Hu Xin

The maintenance costs of offshore wind turbines operated under the irregular, non-stationary conditions limit the development of offshore wind power industry. Unlike onshore wind farms, the weather conditions (wind and waves) have greater impacts on the operation and maintenance of offshore wind farm. Accessibility is a key factor related to the operation and maintenance of offshore wind turbine. Considering the impact of weather conditions on the maintenance activities, the Markov method and dynamic time window are applied to represent the weather conditions, and an index used to evaluate the maintenance accessibility is then proposed. As the wind turbine is a multi-component complex system, this article uses the opportunistic maintenance strategy to optimize the preventive maintenance age and opportunistic maintenance age for the main components of the wind turbine. Taking the minimum expectation cost as objective function, this strategy integrates the maintenance work of the key components. Finally, an offshore wind farm is taken for simulation case study of this strategy; the results showed that the maintenance cost of opportunistic maintenance strategy is 10% lower than that of the preventive maintenance strategy, verifying the effectiveness of the opportunistic maintenance.


Author(s):  
Jenny M. V. Trumars ◽  
Johan O. Jonsson ◽  
Lars Bergdahl

The aim of this work is to evaluate data from the offshore wind farm Bockstigen in order to study the effect of directional spreading of waves and wind wave misalignment on the response of the structure. The development of offshore wind energy has led to wind farms at sites with water depths ranging from approximately 6 to 30 m. The change of location from land to sea changes the design requirements of wind energy converters. In addition to wind loads, the wave load on the structure has to be taken into account. Since a wind turbine is highly damped in the inline direction as compared to the crosswise direction, the effect of directional spreading of waves on the response is studied. Depending on the dynamics of the structure the crosswise force could give a larger response than the corresponding inline force. In this study the influence of the directional spreading of the waves on the response is not clear, however the effect of wind and wave misalignment is clear.


Author(s):  
Toshiki Chujo ◽  
Yoshimasa Minami ◽  
Tadashi Nimura ◽  
Shigesuke Ishida

The experimental proof of the floating wind turbine has been started off Goto Islands in Japan. Furthermore, the project of floating wind farm is afoot off Fukushima Prof. in north eastern part of Japan. It is essential for realization of the floating wind farm to comprehend its safety, electric generating property and motion in waves and wind. The scale model experiments are effective to catch the characteristic of floating wind turbines. Authors have mainly carried out scale model experiments with wind turbine models on SPAR buoy type floaters. The wind turbine models have blade-pitch control mechanism and authors focused attention on the effect of blade-pitch control on both the motion of floater and fluctuation of rotor speed. In this paper, the results of scale model experiments are discussed from the aspect of motion of floater and the effect of blade-pitch control.


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