Current Research | Offshore Engineering

CFD investigation of FWOT performance under extreme wave conditions

Because of worries about energy crisis in recent years, it is imperative to find a cleaner and more efficient way to produce energy, to satisfy the world’s growing appetite for energy. As a clean way to harvest energy, wind turbines became a good option. In the past, they were mostly deployed on land, far away from the city centre. Compared with onshore turbines, offshore turbines have the advantage of being located close to the population centres, which makes it more attractive. When the water becomes deeper when moving forward to the ocean, fixing a wind turbine on the seabed in deep water is so expensive that it is impossible to put them on the market. That the purpose of developing floating offshore wind turbines (FOWT) which can be installed to any depth.

The research will focus on the influence and damage of the complex situation on the floating structure, with current, wave, and wind combined. In consideration of the complex situation in deep waters and the impossibility for a wind turbine to move to a safe location, aerodynamics, hydrodynamics and structural dynamics of a FOWT under extreme sea conditions are extraordinarily important. Therefore, more attention will be paid to study and analyse the ability for a FOWT to survive. At this phase, a CFD tool combined with an open-source multibody software is developed to simulate the mechanic links between different parts of structures.