A CFD study for floating offshore wind turbine aerodynamics in turbulent wind field

Zhou, Yang and Xiao, Qing and Liu, Yuanchuan and Incecik, Atilla and Peyrard, Christophe and Wan, Decheng and Li, Sunwei (2021) A CFD study for floating offshore wind turbine aerodynamics in turbulent wind field. In: ASME 2020 3nd International Offshore Wind Technical Conference, 2021-02-14 - 2021-02-17. (https://doi.org/10.1115/IOWTC2021-3515)

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Abstract

The present study is aimed at investigating the turbulent wind effect on FOWT through the usage of a high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. This method is believed to resolve the wind field, giving us a more in-depth examination into the aerodynamics of FOWT. The work is built upon our previous studies on the modelling of a coupled aerohydro- mooring FOWT system under regular wave and uniform wind. In the present study, we replaced the previously uniform wind with a temporal and spatial variable turbulent wind field using a time-varying spectrum. The turbulent wind is generated with Mann’s wind turbulence model while the Von Karman wind spectrum is used to represent wind turbulence. The present study shows that when turbulent wind is present, there may be fluctuations of the rotor thrust and power outputs, causing the non-uniform wake region. Despite this, both the dynamic motions and the mooring tensions of the floater are not significantly influenced by the wind turbulence under the present inflow wind conditions.