A floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) concept with a guy-wire-supported tower was investigated to obtain motion results in waves considering its elastic model characteristics. The FOWT concept studied aims to reduce the construction costs by using a light-weight structure tensioned with guy wires and a downwind type. Wave tank experiments of an elastically similar segmented backbone model in the 1:60 scale were carried out to clarify the dynamic elastic response features of the structure. The experimental results were compared with numerical simulations obtained from NK-UTWind and WAMIT codes. The bending moment measured at the tower and pontoons had two peak values for different wave periods carried out. The short-wave period peak was due to sagging/hogging when the wavelength matched the floater length. The second peak was due to the large tower top acceleration, which caused a large bending moment at the tower base and pontoon to support the inertia force. The wind force was not significant to modify the FOWT response. The sensibility analysis in pontoons and tower rigidities confirmed the importance of the guy wires to support the inertia due to the waves and wind incidence. The new concept of a very-light FOWT with a guy-wire-supported tower may be an option for future FOWT developments.
The choice of drag and inertia coefficients are critical for the evaluation of hydrodynamic loads in slender cylinders using either Morison’s equation or an approach where viscous forces are simply added to the results of potential theory. Many studies available in the literature have considered fixed cylinders under the action of (two dimensional) sinusoidal currents, showing that the average values of drag and added mass coefficients can be correlated with the Keulegan-Carpenter and Reynolds numbers. However, when the semi-empirical models are used for the analysis of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs), many other aspects of the flow may play an important role, such as the spatial variations of the wave flow over the hull, three-dimensional flow effects associated with the floater motions, the presence of heave plates, among others. The present work is based on a case-study involving a simplified version of the floater of a semi-submersible FOWT and deals with cases where the incoming flow is composed of more than one frequency and body motions are a combination of periodic components with very different frequencies (wave frequency and slow-drift motions). In this case, the choice of proper coefficients for the Morison’s approach becomes somewhat puzzling, to say the least. The objective is to understand how the more complex flow and the coexistence of different frequencies affect the hydrodynamic forces and whether proper values of force coefficients can indeed be obtained from simplified model tests performed in the absence of incoming waves, such as forced oscillations and decay tests. For doing so, the paper analyses the results of an experimental campaign performed with the model scale floater (1:80) composed of four vertical circular columns. Three sets of tests are taken into account: forced oscillations of the hull, free decays of the moored model, and motions under the action of waves (monochromatic and bichromatic). The first two are used to assess the values of added mass and drag coefficients (and also for obtaining linearized damping levels), while the third group of tests helps to evaluate the accuracy of the motions predicted when using these coefficients in frequency-domain computations.
To obtain fundamental knowledge on the elastic response characteristics of a lightweight floating support structure of a FOWT (floating offshore wind turbine) with guywire supported tower, basic load transmission mechanism was investigated. Static analysis with elastic frame model, numerical analysis and wave tank experiment with elastically and dynamically similar segmented backbone model were conducted to clarify the dynamic elastic response characteristics of the structure. In the numerical analysis, analysis code of a rotor-floater-mooring-control coupled response NK-UTWind developed in University of Tokyo is used. It is clarified that when the rigidity of the frame structural part is low compared with guywire, the load is mainly borne by guywire under pitch motion. It was found that the tension fluctuation of guywire becomes large at wave period of 6 s when the inertial force due to pitch motion is large, and at wave period of 18-20 s when inclination of tower is larger the tension fluctuation also becomes large due to the overturning moment.
The damping evaluation of floating offshore systems is based on the viscous effects that are not considered in numerical models using the potential theory. Usually, different techniques for different systems are used to evaluate these hydrodynamic coefficients. The total damping is separated by potential and viscous damping, the first one is evaluated numerically and the second through experiments at reduced scale model. Common techniques considering linear motion equations cannot be applied to all degrees of freedom. Some methods were compared for results of decay test, such as: exponential and quadratic fit. Fourier transform (FT) spectral analysis and Hilbert Huang transform (HHT) can be used to evaluate the signal natural frequency and with HHT this can be done during the time domain. Also, analysis through the Random Decrement Technique (RDT) is presented to demonstrate the damping evaluation for irregular waves. The method to obtain external damping was presented for the different techniques in an ITTC semi-submersible model. The linear method is not sufficient to predict the damping coefficient for all the cases, because in most of them, the viscous damping was better represented by a quadratic fit. The HHT showed to be a good alternative to evaluate damping in non-linear systems.
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