Supergen ORE Hub Webinar Series: On the development of a short design event approach for speeding up the prediction of design loads for floating wind turbines

The floating offshore renewable energy (FORE) design process recommended by standards authorities requires the simulation of thousands of different design load cases (DLCs). The DLC which has the device in survival mode requires multiple 1 hour simulations per sea state along a 50-year return period contour. For fixed offshore wind a constrained wave approach is permitted where a nonlinear regular wave or NewWave (average profile of the largest wave expected in a particular sea state) is embedded into a 10-minute background wave, which is then used in place of the 1-hour simulations to save time and cost.

However, such a constrained wave method is not appropriate for FORE devices as it is not necessarily the largest wave which produces the largest response of interest. A response conditioned focused wave method where the magnitude and phase of the linear response amplitude operators (RAOs) has been adapted from the area of ship design to try and produce an alternative constrained wave method for FORE. The method has been extended to incorporate wind loading for floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) and tested numerically on 8 devices covering the 4 main platform types (Spar, semi-sub, TLP, barge).

This research was conducted in collaboration with DNV and Vercity, building on the work carried out as part of the Supergen ORE Hub Work Package Four (Design for Future ORE Solutions) and was extended through an EPSRC-funded impact accelerator award.

View the webinar recording here.