CFD STUDY OF FULLY COUPLED AERO-HYDRODYNAMIC PERFORMANCES OF FLOATING OFFSHORE WIND TURBINES

Designing floating offshore wind turbine system is a quite challenging task because of the complex environmental loading and complicated coupling effects. For predicting the coupled aero-hydrodynamic loads on a floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) system, the numerical method, which is much cheaper and without the limitation of the scaling law compared to model test, is becoming a key method in loads predicting of a FOWT. Based on the open source platform OpenFOAM, Prof. Decheng Wan’s team developed the CFD solver naoe-FOAM-SJTU to investigate hydrodynamic problems in the field of ship and ocean engineering, and a CFD solver FOWT-UALM-SJTU for aerodynamic simulation of wind turbine. By combining these two solvers, the fully coupled aero-hydrodynamic simulation of a floating offshore wind turbine is carried out. By using the solver, the validation of unsteady aerodynamic loads was conducted compared to different numerical methods. Moreover, the coupled aero-hydrodynamic simulation for a FOWT was also completed compared to the simplified method.