Extreme Loading on Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs) under Complex Environmental Conditions
Lead Research Organisation:
Lancaster University
Department Name: Engineering
Abstract
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Organisations
Publications
Ortolani A
(2020)
Computational Fluid Dynamics Analysis of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines in Severe Pitching Conditions
in Journal of Engineering for Gas Turbines and Power
Ortolani A
(2022)
Multi-fidelity Analyses of Rotor Loads of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines with Wind/Wave Misalignment
in Journal of Physics: Conference Series
Ortolani A
(2020)
Cross-comparative analysis of loads and power of pitching floating offshore wind turbine rotors using frequency-domain Navier-Stokes CFD and blade element momentum theory
in Journal of Physics: Conference Series
| Description | One finding of this research is the quantification of the uncertainty associated with using fast low-fidelity engineering codes rather than more time-consuming but more reliable high-fidelity methods, such as computtional fluid dynamics (CFD) codes determining time-dependent pressure and velocity fields past the turbine components by solving the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes (NS) equations. NS CFD code simulations, often made faster by using large computer clusters rather than a single PC, enable reliable estimates of both the power generaion and the aerodynamic and the hydrodynamic loads of floating offshore wind turbins (FOWTs). The increased reliability of these predictions, in turn, enables more cost-effective designs, which contributes to reduce overall capital costs (e.g. material costs) and the cost of energy. The present research found that in certain design-driving operating conditions, such as those in which wind and sea wave direction differ, CFD predictions of FOWT blade structural loads (e.g. blade root bending moment) differ by between 10 and 20 percent from the industrial code predictions, highlighting the design improvements achievable by incorporating NS CFD in the FOWT design process. A second finding is the development of a new frequency-domain high-fidelity CFD approach to FOWT performance and load analysis based on the incompressible flow NS equations. This technology, implemented in the ARCTIC harmonic balance code during this project, has been developed to reduce the computational burden of high-fidelity NS CFD using the conventional time-domain CFD approach incurred when making reliable engineering assessment of FOWT installations. The ARCTIC simulations of this project have shown that the harmonic balance analysis of complex FOWT operating regimes, such as those of wind/wave misalignment, can be performed more than 10 times faster than conventional time-domain CFD does with negligible accuracy penaly in the calculated engineering outputs. This makes the high-fidelity CFD technology closer to being exploited in industry, with consequent technological and economical benefits. |
| Exploitation Route | Part of simulation-based technologies will be made more visible to the research and industrial community to enable others to exploit their potential. Part of the codes developed in this project (e.g. ARCTIC code) are presently undergoing further development within new software infrastructure projects, aiming to both further improve the functionalities of the these codes, and improve the ease of use of these codes. Both objectives aim at widening the user basis of this software. |
| Sectors | Aerospace, Defence and Marine,Energy |
| Description | The findings of this research will be initially used by this research's industrial partners to improve their floating turbine analysis and design standards. One particularly important aspect is that the floating turbine market is projected to rapidly grow in Asia, where selected sites feature more extreme climates than in Europe and the UK industry will be a major stakeholder in this new business, wehre the impact of this research will thus be particularly prominent. |
| Sector | Aerospace, Defence and Marine,Energy |
| Description | ARCHER2 eCSE, eCSE04-1 |
| Amount | £98,717 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | eCSE04-1 |
| Organisation | Daresbury Laboratory |
| Sector | Private |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 10/2021 |
| End | 09/2022 |
| Title | ARCTIC Navier-Stokes incompressible code for wind energy applications. |
| Description | ARCTIC, a new incompressible Navier-Stokes for the analysis of geometry-resolved wind turbines and wind farms has been developed and tested in the framework of this EPSRC grant. The code has been used successfully on tier1 computer clusters for the analysis of challenging conditions of wind/wave misalignment of floating wind turbines. The code has very high parallel scalability and is therefore well suited for disruptive turbine-resolved wind farm simulations yielind high reliability of energy losses due to turbine/wake interactions in large wind farms. The high efficiency of large simulations using about 20,000 cores of ARCHER2, the UK National Supercomputing service, has recently been demonstrated in a new ongoing EPSRC eCSE project, aiming at using ARCTIC for large wind farms of both fixed-bottom and floating wind turbines. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2019 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | One of the first impacts is the further assessment of the analysis and design capabilities of industrial low-fidelity tools used in the industry. The floating wind turbine analyses conducted with ARCTIC have enabled to identify new design-driving regimes where the predictive functionalities of industrial low-fidelity codes need to be improved with the ultimate goal of increasing floating turbine durability and energyt efficiency. New impacts are expected in the area of wind farm analysis and energy yield optimisation, where the turbine geometry-resolved wind farm analyses of ARCTIC will improve the physical resolutions of ket aerodynamic features affecting energy yield and turbine loads. |