scholarly journals Hydrodynamic Response of the Deep Turbine Installation-Floating Concept

Author(s):  
Jordi Serret ◽  
Tim Stratford ◽  
Philipp R. Thies ◽  
Vengatesan Venugopal ◽  
Tahsin Tezdogan

Abstract Floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) installations are progressing from the R&D stage to commercial installation projects. The prospective sites are situated in increasingly deeper water and further away from the shore. This paper presents the Deep Turbine Installation-Floating (DTI-F) concept, an innovative hybrid spar buoy-based FOWT capable of being able to raise and lower the tower and nacelle, which simplifies construction, installation, maintenance and decommissioning. The study is focused on the hydrodynamics of the moored floating system, and it is based on experimental and numerical modelling work. A 1:45 Froude scaled model of the DTI-F wind concept was tested using three different mooring configurations: i) three mooring lines, ii) four mooring lines, and iii) three mooring lines with a delta connection. Free decay and stiffness decay tests were carried out together with regular and irregular wave tests. The numerical study comprises diffraction (ANSYS AQWA) and time-domain modelling (OrcaFlex). The experimental hydrostatic and hydrodynamic results are compared with the numerical simulations based on the as-built scale model. Considering the natural frequencies results obtained for the three mooring configurations, the three lines configuration without delta connection was selected as the most suitable design. The obtained results for the three mooring lines configuration show good agreement between the experiment and numerical simulations. The presented analysis of the design concept indicates a high degree of technical feasibility.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan Guillouzouic ◽  
François Pétrié ◽  
Vincent Lafon ◽  
Fabien Fremont

Abstract Mooring is one of the key components of a floating offshore wind turbine since the mooring rupture may lead to the total loss of one or even several turbines in a farm. Even if a large experience in moorings of floating bodies was gained in the oil & gas industry, the renewable energies face new challenges such as reducing the cost as much as possible, reducing the footprint to limit environmental impact or avoid any interference between mooring lines and electrical cables in a farm composed of several tens of turbines. Those constraints may lead to designs suffering snap loads which shall be avoided as far as practicable or addressed with a particular attention, as this quasi-instantaneous stretching of the mooring lines may lead to very high tensions governing the design. This paper presents the results of physical model tests and numerical simulations performed on a typical floating wind turbine concept of semi-submersible type. Both qualitative and quantitative comparisons are performed. The objective is to provide guidelines for FOWT mooring designers regarding the selection of the drag coefficient to consider. A very significant influence of the line’s drag coefficient, on both the probability of occurrence and the magnitude of snap loads, was found. This subject is hereby fully documented on a given case study and general discussions on scale effects, marine growth effects and other parameters are also made. The numerical simulations were performed using the dynamic analysis software ‘OrcaFlex’. The experiments have been carried out by Océanide, in south of France.


Author(s):  
Lars Ivar Hatledal ◽  
Houxiang Zhang ◽  
Karl Henning Halse ◽  
Hans Petter Hildre

Current methods for installation of offshore wind turbines are all sensitive to the weather conditions and the present cost level of offshore wind power is more than twice the cost of land-based units, increasing with water depth. This paper presents numerical simulations of a novel experimental gripper design to reduce the environmental effects applied to a catamaran type of vessel during wind turbine installation. In SFI MOVE project in NTNU Aalesund, our team proposed a novel wind turbine installation process. A new catamaran vessel will carry pre-assembled wind turbines to the installation location. Two new designed grippers on the deck will make a lifting operation to install the wind turbine onto the turbine foundation. Three prismatic grippers with several rolling contact points at the end are attached in an arc at the catamaran’s aft, designed to grasp the turbine foundation in order to make a connection between the two in the horizontal plane. This paper will only emphasize the contact responses between the turbine foundation and the three grippers during the wind turbine installation process. Numerical simulations are carried out using the virtual prototyping framework Vicosim which is developed by NTNU Aalesund. The simulation results show validation of a key part of the proposed new wind turbine installation idea.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 179
Author(s):  
Giovanni Amaral ◽  
Pedro Mello ◽  
Lucas do Carmo ◽  
Izabela Alberto ◽  
Edgard Malta ◽  
...  

The present work highlights some of the dynamic couplings observed in a series of tests performed in a wave basin with a scaled-model of a Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) with semi-submersible substructure. The model was moored by means of a conventional chain catenary system and an actively controlled fan was used for emulating the thrust loads during the tests. A set of wave tests was performed for concomitant effects of not aligned wave and wind. The experimental measurements illustrate the main coupling effects involved and how they affect the FOWT motions in waves, especially when the floater presents a non-negligible tilt angle. In addition, a frequency domain numerical analysis was performed in order to evaluate its ability to capture these effects properly. The influence of different modes of fan response, floater trim angles (changeable with ballast compensation) and variations in the mooring stiffness with the offsets were investigated in the analysis. Results attest that significant changes in the FOWT responses may indeed arise from coupling effects, thus indicating that caution must be taken when simplifying the hydrodynamic frequency-domain models often used as a basis for the simulation of FOWTs in waves and in optimization procedures for the design of the floater and mooring lines.


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 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 703 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juhun Song ◽  
Hee-Chang Lim

In this study, the typical ocean environment was simulated with the aim to investigate the dynamic response under various environmental conditions of a Tension Leg Platform (TLP) type floating offshore wind turbine system. By applying Froude scaling, a scale model with a scale of 1:200 was designed and model experiments were carried out in a lab-scale wave flume that generated regular periodic waves by means of a piston-type wave generator while a wave absorber dissipated wave energy on the other side of the channel. The model was designed and manufactured based on the standard prototype of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) 5 MW offshore wind turbine. In the first half of the study, the motion and structural responses for operational wave conditions of the North Sea near Scotland were considered to investigate the performance of a traditional TLP floating wind turbine compared with that of a newly designed TLP with added mooring lines. The new mooring lines were attached with the objective of increasing the horizontal stiffness of the system and thereby reducing the dominant motion of the TLP platform (i.e., the surge motion). The results of surge translational motions were obtained both in the frequency domain, using the response amplitude operator (RAO), and in the time domain, using the omega arithmetic method for the relative velocity. The results obtained show that our suggested concept improves the stability of the platform and reduces the overall motion of the system in all degrees-of-freedom. Moreover, the modified design was verified to enable operation in extreme wave conditions based on real data for a 100-year return period of the Northern Sea of California. The loads applied by the waves on the structure were also measured experimentally using modified Morison equation—the formula most frequently used to estimate wave-induced forces on offshore floating structures. The corresponding results obtained show that the wave loads applied on the new design TLP had less amplitude than the initial model and confirmed the significant contribution of the mooring lines in improving the performance of the system.


Author(s):  
Jaime Torres Lopez ◽  
Longbin Tao ◽  
Longfei Xiao ◽  
Zhiqiang Hu

The scaled model testing of a FPSO with its mooring lines and risers for deepwater and ultra-deepwater installation sites is considered to be the most reliable methodology to study the complex hydrodynamic behaviour of the complete system, since it can represent the nearest real environmental conditions and the comprehensive hydrodynamic interactions of the waves, current and wind with the total floating production system. The best technical option, at the present time, is a combination of an appropriate scale model of the FPSO and a suitable level of truncation obtained using a hybrid passive truncated experimental methodology for the mooring lines and risers. This is in order to minimize the various uncertainties in model behaviour and to study the hydrodynamic behaviour of the complete floating system and thus to validate numerical design of prototype systems for installation in deepwater and ultra-deepwater locations. This paper investigates the global response of a specific FPSO to prevailing environmental conditions, based on a hybrid passive truncated experimental methodology for the mooring lines and risers in a specific deepwater location with a water depth of 1000m in the GOM. The main objective of the experiment is to examine the nonlinear effects of the FPSO vessel and its mooring lines and to provide reliable experimental data for subsequent extrapolation to a full scale prototype design. Several case studies were carried out. The FPSO global responses for Full load and Ballast Load conditions with static and dynamic load tension components of the truncated mooring lines were studied for both collinear and non-collinear extreme storm environmental conditions. The experiments revealed that the main horizontal plane motion response of the FPSO (surge) under non-collinear loading condition is almost two-times that of the collinear loading condition.


2012 ◽  
Vol 170-173 ◽  
pp. 2316-2321
Author(s):  
Ruo Yu Zhang ◽  
Chao He Chen ◽  
You Gang Tang

In this paper, the dynamic behaviors are studied for Spar type floating foundation of a 3kW in the 10m deep water considering the coupled wind turbine-tower-floating foundation and mooring lines and ocean environment load effects. The paper focus on the key issues of design of floating foundation, such as coupling dynamic analysis model and calculating method. The finite element models are established and dynamic responses of floating wind turbine system under different combinations of turbulent wind, constant current and irregular wave are calculated in frequency and time domain with SESAM software. The motion performance and lines’ tension are investigated, and some valuable conclusions are drawn. The results show that the Spar type floating foundation and mooring system can work in the ocean environment which significant wave height less than 2m, the designed large water-entrapment plate can minimized the motion of floating foundation obviously.


Author(s):  
Wei-Ting Hsu ◽  
Krish P. Thiagarajan ◽  
Lance Manuel

There are several challenges facing the design of mooring system of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs), including installation costs, stability of lightweight minimalistic platforms, and shallow water depths (50–300m). For station keeping of FOWTs, a proper mooring system is required in order to maintain the translational motions in surge and sway and the rotational motions in yaw of the platform within an adequate range. A combination of light pre-tension, shallow water depth and large platform motions in response to a survival storm condition can result in snap-type impact events on mooring lines, thus increasing the line tension dramatically. In this paper, we present a new snap load criterion applicable to a catenary mooring system and compare it with Det Norske Veritas’ criterion for marine operations. As a case study, we examine the extreme tension on a catenary mooring system of a semi-submersible FOWT exposed to a 100-year storm condition. The software OrcaFlex was used for numerical simulations of the mooring system. NREL’s FAST software was coupled to OrcaFlex to obtain aerodynamic loads along with hydrodynamic loads for FOWT analyses. Snap-type impact events were observed in the numerical simulations and were characterized by two criteria. Tension maxima were fitted using composite Weibull distributions (CWDs) and comparisons of probability exceedance were made for the two different snap load criteria.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 14014
Author(s):  
Yi-Hung Chen ◽  
Ray-Yeng Yang

The concept of multiline anchor, whose application is mainly considered in water depths beyond 100 m and analyzed only by numerical simulation, has been discussed for half a decade, yet previous studies have not conducted the wave basin experiment. Thus, this paper set this concept firstly with a shallow water mooring system designed for a Taiwan offshore water area, where the suitable water depth for floating offshore wind turbine is located from 50 to 100 m, and then conducted a 1:144 scaled model wave basin experiment to validate the results from numerical simulation. In this paper, the numerical model simulated and analyzed three identical DeepCwind OC4 semi-submersible platforms equipped with NREL 5MW wind turbines in OrcaFlex and the experiment carried out by using three 1:144 scaled semi-submersible platforms with equivalent disks which simulated different operations of wind thrusts. To consider the possible influence of the wake effect, the minimum turbines spacing was set at 750 m in a full scaled model and the length of mooring lines was redesigned according to the catenary theory. This paper utilized OrcaWave to calculate hydrodynamic parameters and input it into OrcaFlex to simulate the line tension and the three degrees of freedom (surge, heave, and pitch) of the platforms under regular and irregular wave tests, and coordinate with scaled model tests carried out in Tainan Hydraulics Laboratory (THL). In addition to the reduction in the number of anchors, the concept of multiline anchor was also discussed in this study for the spatial configuration of offshore wind farms. It shows that the wind farm composed of three floating wind turbines can reduce the ocean space by roughly 24% compared to that with a single-line anchor. According to the comparison of numerical and experimental results, this study finally optimized the mooring lines by changing the diameter to increase the stability and the threshold of Minimum Breaking Load (MBL) and proposed a multiline anchor configuration for shallow offshore water area in Taiwan based on the results obtained.


Author(s):  
Masaaki Aoki ◽  
Sharath Srinivasamurthy ◽  
Kazuhiro Iijima ◽  
Naoyuki Hara ◽  
Tomoki Ikoma ◽  
...  

Wind power generation has been paid much attention over the years as a countermeasure against global warming. Especially in recent years, researches and developments have also been made on Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) in relatively deep offshore. Unlike Bottom-mounted Offshore Wind Turbine (BOWT), the motion characteristics of FOWT is complicated owing to coupled response of wind turbine and floating platform motions since the FOWT system is not fixed to the seabed. Due to these complexities, negative damping is one of the major problems reported for SPAR type FOWT moored by catenary chains. Negative Damping, in which the natural periodic motion is excited by blade pitch control employed for keeping the power generation constant, has to be addressed. In this paper, we discuss the negative damping of TLP type FOWT with a series of dedicated experiments. We manufactured a 1/100th-scale model TLP type FOWT model with a primary control system of the blade pitch angle for a geometrically scaled model of the 5MW wind turbine based on the NREL. At first, we formulated the mechanism for occurrence of Negative Damping and derived the conditions under which unstable fluctuations of the floating platform occurs using the motion equation. After that, we conducted scale model tank tests in wind alone and confirmed the phenomenon wherein the fluctuation of the floating platform does not converge. Finally, how dangerous such coupled motion of wind turbine and floating platform would be for real-scale FOWT is discussed.


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