Improved high fidelity Hydrodynamic Model for Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Analysis

The Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) industry has rapidly grown from 2.3MW in 2009 to an impressive 15MW by 2023, with plans for larger 20MW and 25MW capacities.

This growth poses challenges in cost, fabrication, manufacturing, and installation due to increased floater size and weight. Low to medium-fidelity hydrodynamic engineering models and higher safety factors are one of the reasons for this surge.

High-fidelity models offer the most accurate representation of the underlying physics, minimizing approximations, however, they come with high computational costs.

Our primary objective is to adopt high-fidelity CFD-based hydrodynamic models by significantly reducing computational time using the SWENSE and integrating them into aero-elastic solvers for FOWT analysis.

This methodology involves decomposing the velocity field into incident and complementary velocity fields and solving only the complementary velocity field in the CFD domain, saving significant computational time.

The developed solver will be systematically upgraded (four work packages) from single floating body to multi-body FOWT simulations.

The resulting solver will play a pivotal role in unraveling the aero-hydro-structural behavior of FOWT systems during extreme wave interaction, fostering advancements in Operation and Maintenance research, and effectively addressing technical knowledge gaps in the FOWT field. There will be experiments to analyze boat-FOWT interaction as well as to evaluate the developed solver.

My host institution runs the renowned Aeroelastic tool HAWC2, and my supervisor is a world-renowned expert in the numerical development of FOWT and physical model testing. He is well-suited to mentor this project with his expertise in both hydrodynamics and aeroelasticity.

This endeavor will bridge the gap in my expertise, transforming me from a Hydrodynamicist into an overall floating wind energy specialist, while gaining a knowledge base from aerodynamics and aeroelasticity.