Efficient Design of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines

Abstract The offshore wind industry trend is towards larger floating wind turbines to lower the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE). It is more difficult to design, install, and maintain them. The challenges related to a large floating wind turbine design and analysis are to model and analyze in the time domain the fully coupled system that includes flexible turbine tower dynamics, rotor dynamics, and floating platform dynamics. Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) analysis and design require more design load cases than oil and gas platforms due to the various wind turbine operating conditions. This takes a very long time and extends the engineering schedule significantly. To reduce time and make the design process efficient and accurate, a more automated design process and tools are required along with using High Performance Computing (HPC) resources. The improved processes and tools developed for oil and gas production platforms have been improved and adapted to the design and analysis of FOWT for quick investigation of different design parameters and select an optimum design satisfying all the design criteria upfront and minimizing required design iterations which are normally not possible in a FOWT project due to long analysis and design time. Global response and improved structural analysis methodology compatible with HPC are used for efficient analysis and design of FOWT and associated mooring. The results show that the design cycle time is not only significantly reduced, but the estimation of full lifetime estimation of platform performance and energy production is more accurate. The tools developed can also be used as a digital twin for quick estimation of performance and conditioning.