Numerical and experimental investigation into the dynamic response of a floating wind turbine spar array platform

The station keeping ability of a platform is the most fundamental guarantee to securing the dynamic stability of a Floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) when being subjected to complex marine environment. These are usually evaluated in terms of rigid body dynamic response of a floating platform which supports whole FOWT. To investigate the dynamic response of array of FOWT, we put forward the concept of a large FOWT farm which consists of nine spar-type wind turbine array and meanwhile shares mooring line system by connecting those FOWT to one another. The whole FOWT is established based on OC3-Hywind spar buoy platform with NREL 5MW wind turbine. Considering effects of wind, wave and current loads, the dynamic response of the proposed FOWT was conducted based on FEM software ANSYS AQWA under both operational condition and survival condition. Besides, comparisons of dynamic response between the original single FOWT and the proposed FOWT farm were also made. Several interesting conclusions were gained through the investigation. For the original single FOWT, RAO in surge, heave and pitch are concentrated in low frequency, while the peak value of frequency is about 0.2 rad/s. In addition, FOWT (P1, P3, P7 and P9) located on the four vertices of 3×3 have higher sway motion which range from about -0.15 m~ 0.15 m, while sway motion of the rest can be neglected. With the worsening of environmental condition, surge motion of the original single FOWT increases significantly, while it’s not significant for the proposed FOWT farm. At the same time, statistic values of pitch motion of the proposed FOWT farm are quite close to those of the original single FOWT. While, under the survival condition, range of pitch motion of the proposed FOWT farm is significantly smaller than that of the original single FOWT. In all, the results verify the effectiveness of the proposed FOWT farm.