The platform pitching motion of floating offshore wind turbine: A preliminary unsteady aerodynamic analysis

Abstract

The flow-field around the rotor blades of an FOWT may be significantly influenced by the six rigid-body motions of the floating platform via the blade-wake interaction. Therefore, the accurate prediction of unsteady aerodynamic load which is calculated by many conventional numerical approaches is still questionable for an FOWT. In this study, the periodic pitching motion of the rotating turbine blades due to the floating platform motion is considered to investigate the effects of vortex-wake-blade interaction for the aerodynamic performance of an FOWT. The unsteady computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations based on the dynamic mesh technique were applied for analyzing the pitching motion of wind turbine due to the platform motion. The in-house unsteady blade element momentum code using the direct local relative velocity approach was also applied to simulate the unsteady aerodynamic performance. The equivalent average velocity approach which simplifies the relative velocity contribution due to the platform motion was proposed and incorporated to the in-house code. It is shown that the unsteady aerodynamic loads of the floating offshore wind turbine become sensitively changed due to the variation of frequency and amplitude of the platform motion. Additionally, there are strong flow interaction phenomena between the rotating blades with oscillating motions and generated blade-tip vortices. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.