Control of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines: Reduced-Order Modeling and Real-Time Implementation for Wind Tunnel Tests

Author(s):  
Alessandro Fontanella ◽  
Ilmas Bayati ◽  
Marco Belloli

The present work deals with the implementation of a variable-speed variable-pitch control strategy on a wind turbine scale model for hybrid/HIL wind tunnel tests on floating offshore wind turbines. The effects that scaling issues, due to low-Reynolds aerodynamics and rotor structural properties, have in combination with the HIL technique developed by the authors are studied through a dedicated reduced-order linear coupled model. The model is used to tune the original pitch controller gains so to be able to reproduce the system response of the full-scale floating wind turbine during HIL tests.

Author(s):  
Alessandro Fontanella ◽  
Ilmas Bayati ◽  
Federico Taruffi ◽  
Francesco La Mura ◽  
Alan Facchinetti ◽  
...  

Abstract This article presents a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) methodology developed at Politecnico di Milano (PoliMi) to perform wind tunnel tests on floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs). The 6-DOFs HIL setup is presented, focusing on the main differences with respect to a previous 2-DOFs system. Aerodynamic, rotor and control related loads, physically reproduced by the wind turbine scale model, must be measured in real-time and integrated with the platform numerical model. These forces contribute to couple wind turbine and floating platform dynamics and their correct reproduction is of fundamental importance for the correct simulation of the floating system behavior. The procedure developed to extract rotor loads from the available measurements is presented, discussing its limitations and the possible uncertainties introduced in the results. Results from verification tests in no-wind conditions are presented and analyzed to identify the main uncertainty sources and quantify their effect on the reproduction of the floating wind turbine response to combined wind and waves.


Author(s):  
Toshiki Chujo ◽  
Shigesuke Ishida ◽  
Yoshimasa Minami ◽  
Tadashi Nimura ◽  
Shunji Inoue

The study of floating offshore wind turbines has recently been attractive to many research groups in the renewable energy. Because the area of shallow water along Japanese coast is limited, the development of floating base for wind turbine is inevitable for making large scale wind farms. There are some problems to be solved for floating offshore wind turbines. Besides the mechanical problems of turbines, the influence of the motion of the floater in wind and waves to the electric generation properties, the safeties of floating structures such as the fatigue of machines and structures or criteria of electric facilities should be studied. Several types of floating structures have been proposed such as SPAR, TLP, pontoon, and semi submersibles. The authors have focused on SPAR type because its simpler shape seems to have economical advantages. In this paper, the authors performed experiments in a wind tunnel and a water basin from the viewpoint of “wind turbines on a SPAR type floating structure”. Firstly, forced pitching experiments were operated in a wind tunnel, and the difference in two types of wind turbines, upwind type and downwind type, is discussed. The former type is very popular and the latter type is thought to be suitable for floating structure. Secondly, experiments which thought to be more relevant for a floating wind turbine were carried out in a water basin. The relationship between the location of the attachment point of mooring lines and the motion of the SPAR in waves, and the influence of pitching angle of turbine blades to the motion of the SPAR in waves were inspected. In these experiments it was used a mechanism to control the pitch angle of the blades of the scale model of wind turbine.


Author(s):  
Matthew J. Fowler ◽  
Richard W. Kimball ◽  
Dale A. Thomas ◽  
Andrew J. Goupee

Model basin testing is a standard practice in the design process for offshore floating structures and has recently been applied to floating offshore wind turbines. 1/50th scale model tests performed by the DeepCwind Consortium at Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN) in 2011 on various platform types were able to capture the global dynamic behavior of commercial scale model floating wind turbine systems; however, due to the severe mismatch in Reynolds number between full scale and model scale, the strictly Froude-scaled, geometrically similar wind turbine underperformed greatly. This required significant modification of test wind speeds to match key wind turbine aerodynamic loads, such as thrust. To execute more representative floating wind turbine model tests, it is desirable to have a model wind turbine that more closely matches the performance of the full scale design. This work compares the wind tunnel performance, under Reynolds numbers corresponding to model test Froude-scale conditions, of an alternative wind turbine designed to emulate the performance of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) 5 MW turbine. Along with the test data, the design methodology for creating this wind turbine is presented including the blade element momentum theory design of the performance-matched turbine using the open-source tools WT_Perf and XFoil. In addition, a strictly Froude-scale NREL 5 MW wind turbine design is also tested to provide a basis of comparison for the improved designs. While the improved, performance-matched turbine was designed to more closely match the NREL 5 MW design in performance under low model test Reynolds numbers, it did not maintain geometric similitude in the blade chord and thickness orientations. Other key Froude scaling parameters, such as blade lengths and rotor operational speed, were maintained for the improved designs. The results of this work support the development of protocols for properly designing scale model wind turbines that emulate the full scale design for Froude-scale wind/wave basin tests of floating offshore wind turbines.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 543
Author(s):  
Jiawen Li ◽  
Jingyu Bian ◽  
Yuxiang Ma ◽  
Yichen Jiang

A typhoon is a restrictive factor in the development of floating wind power in China. However, the influences of multistage typhoon wind and waves on offshore wind turbines have not yet been studied. Based on Typhoon Mangkhut, in this study, the characteristics of the motion response and structural loads of an offshore wind turbine are investigated during the travel process. For this purpose, a framework is established and verified for investigating the typhoon-induced effects of offshore wind turbines, including a multistage typhoon wave field and a coupled dynamic model of offshore wind turbines. On this basis, the motion response and structural loads of different stages are calculated and analyzed systematically. The results show that the maximum response does not exactly correspond to the maximum wave or wind stage. Considering only the maximum wave height or wind speed may underestimate the motion response during the traveling process of the typhoon, which has problems in guiding the anti-typhoon design of offshore wind turbines. In addition, the coupling motion between the floating foundation and turbine should be considered in the safety evaluation of the floating offshore wind turbine under typhoon conditions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (24) ◽  
pp. 11665
Author(s):  
Shi Liu ◽  
Yi Yang ◽  
Chao Wang ◽  
Yuangang Tu

Spar-type floating offshore wind turbines commonly vibrate excessively when under the coupling impact of wind and wave. The wind turbine vibration can be controlled by developing its mooring system. Thus, this study proposes a novel mooring system for the spar-type floating offshore wind turbine. The proposed mooring system has six mooring lines, which are divided into three groups, with two mooring lines in the same group being connected to the same fairlead. Subsequently, the effects of the included angle between the two mooring lines on the mooring-system’s performance are investigated. Then, these six mooring lines are connected to six independent fairleads for comparison. FAST is utilized to calculate wind turbine dynamic response. Wind turbine surge, pitch, and yaw movements are presented and analyzed in time and frequency domains to quantitatively evaluate the performances of the proposed mooring systems. Compared with the mooring system with six fairleads, the mooring system with three fairleads performed better. When the included angle was 40°, surge, pitch, and yaw movement amplitudes of the wind turbine reduced by 39.51%, 6.8%, and 12.34%, respectively, when under regular waves; they reduced by 56.08%, 25.00%, and 47.5%, respectively, when under irregular waves. Thus, the mooring system with three fairleads and 40° included angle is recommended.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 859
Author(s):  
Thanh-Dam Pham ◽  
Hyunkyoung Shin

Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) have been installed in Europe and Japan with relatively modern technology. The installation of floating wind farms in deep water is recommended because the wind speed is stronger and more stable. The design of the FOWT must ensure it is able to withstand complex environmental conditions including wind, wave, current, and performance of the wind turbine. It needs simulation tools with fully integrated hydrodynamic-servo-elastic modeling capabilities for the floating offshore wind turbines. Most of the numerical simulation approaches consider only first-order hydrodynamic loads; however, the second-order hydrodynamic loads have an effect on a floating platform which is moored by a catenary mooring system. At the difference-frequencies of the incident wave components, the drift motion of a FOWT system is able to have large oscillation around its natural frequency. This paper presents the effects of second-order wave loads to the drift motion of a semi-submersible type. This work also aimed to validate the hydrodynamic model of Ulsan University (UOU) in-house codes through numerical simulations and model tests. The NREL FAST code was used for the fully coupled simulation, and in-house codes of UOU generates hydrodynamic coefficients as the input for the FAST code. The model test was performed in the water tank of UOU.


Author(s):  
Yajun Ren ◽  
Vengatesan Venugopal

Abstract The complex dynamic characteristics of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs) have raised wider consideration, as they are likely to experience harsher environments and higher instabilities than the bottom fixed offshore wind turbines. Safer design of a mooring system is critical for floating offshore wind turbine structures for station keeping. Failure of mooring lines may lead to further destruction, such as significant changes to the platform’s location and possible collisions with a neighbouring platform and eventually complete loss of the turbine structure may occur. The present study focuses on the dynamic responses of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)’s OC3-Hywind spar type floating platform with a NREL offshore 5-MW baseline wind turbine under failed mooring conditions using the fully coupled numerical simulation tool FAST. The platform motions in surge, heave and pitch under multiple scenarios are calculated in time-domain. The results describing the FOWT motions in the form of response amplitude operators (RAOs) and spectral densities are presented and discussed in detail. The results indicate that the loss of the mooring system firstly leads to longdistance drift and changes in platform motions. The natural frequencies and the energy contents of the platform motion, the RAOs of the floating structures are affected by the mooring failure to different degrees.


2020 ◽  
Vol 210 ◽  
pp. 107592
Author(s):  
M. Belloli ◽  
I. Bayati ◽  
A. Facchinetti ◽  
A. Fontanella ◽  
H. Giberti ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Xiaohong Chen ◽  
Qing Yu

This paper presents the research in support of the development of design requirements for floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs). An overview of technical challenges in the design of FOWTs is discussed, followed by a summary of the case studies using representative FOWT concepts. Three design concepts, including a Spar-type, a TLP-type and a Semisubmersible-type floating support structure carrying a 5-MW offshore wind turbine, are selected for the case studies. Both operational and extreme storm conditions on the US Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) are considered. A state-of-the-art simulation technique is employed to perform fully coupled aero-hydro-servo-elastic analysis using the integrated FOWT model. This technique can take into account dynamic interactions among the turbine Rotor-Nacelle Assembly (RNA), turbine control system, floating support structure and stationkeeping system. The relative importance of various design parameters and their impact on the development of design criteria are evaluated through parametric analyses. The paper also introduces the design requirements put forward in the recently published ABS Guide for Building and Classing Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Installations (ABS, 2013).


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