Effects of moonpools and heave plates on hydrodynamic performance of a barge-type floating offshore wind turbine platform in regular waves

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Xu, Hongteng and Jia, Kun and Wang, Enhao and Xiao, Qing and Incecik, Atilla (2025) Effects of moonpools and heave plates on hydrodynamic performance of a barge-type floating offshore wind turbine platform in regular waves. Physics of Fluids, 37 (8). 087166. ISSN 1089-7666 (https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0281290)

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Abstract

A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study is conducted to evaluate the hydrodynamic performance of a barge-type floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) platform subjected to regular wave conditions. A 1:50 scale model is adopted to investigate the influence of moonpool number, dimensions, and configurations, as well as the width of the heave plate. The wave height is fixed at 0.1 m and the wave period is varied from 1.6 to 2.5 s in increments of 0.1 s. Key performance indicators, including motion response amplitude operators (RAOs), mean wave drift force, fairlead tension in mooring lines and pitch angles, are examined in detail. The platform motion response is notably affected by the length of the moonpool in the wave propagation direction. A reduction in the moonpool length slightly increases the motion responses under long-period wave conditions, while significantly decreasing the pitch RAO under short-period waves. Completely removing the moonpool results in increased wave loading, leading to the highest fairlead tension RAO and compromising both the economic viability and safety of the platform, whereas increasing the heave plate width effectively suppresses the platform motions in the heave and pitch directions. Overall, the incorporation of moonpools and heave plates substantially improves the hydrodynamic performance of the barge-type FOWT platform.

ORCID iDs

Xu, Hongteng, Jia, Kun, Wang, Enhao, Xiao, Qing ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8512-5299 and Incecik, Atilla ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-8895-1717;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)