Development of a floating Kuroshio turbine equipped with a foil float: Deployment and recovery simulation

In response to the growing energy needs and the global trend on renewable energy development, we are also dedicated to harvesting marine energy from Kuroshio Current, which flows through the eastern waters of Taiwan. However, due to the lack of the offshore technological experience of constructing and deploying floating turbines with permanent mooring system in deep water, the deployment and recovery operation procedures for such kind of a floating turbine system need to be validated in advance. Therefore, establishing proper modeling and simulation tools to evaluate the operation procedures for the present Floating Kuroshio Turbine (FKT) in advance is necessary. In the present paper, the design concept of the FKT system which is equipped with a foil float for assisting depth control is addressed firstly. Then the simulations of its dynamics, deployment and recovery operations are described. In the modeling and simulation, the numerical model of the FKT is created and its hydrodynamic coefficients are calculated by ANSYS-FLUENT, and OrcaFlex is applied to simulate deployment and recovery operations following the proposed scenario for validating the feasibility of the operations. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the equipped foil float for depth control is also investigated. As the conclusions, not only the feasibility of the deployment and recovery operations for the present FKT system is confirmed, but also the effectiveness of the foil float for the depth control is clarified.