OC6 Phase IV: Validation of CFD Models for Stiesdal TetraSpar Floating Offshore Wind Platform
- Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department University of Massachusetts Amherst Massachusetts USA
- Convergent Science Inc. (CSI) Madison Wisconsin USA
- Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN) Wageningen The Netherlands
- National Wind Technology Center, National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL) Golden Colorado USA
With only a few floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) farms deployed anywhere in the world, FOWT technology is still in its infancy, building on a modicum of real‐world experience to advance the nascent industry. To support further development, engineers rely heavily on modeling tools to accurately portray the behavior of these complex systems under realistic environmental conditions. This reliance creates a need for verification and validation of such tools to improve reliability of load and dynamic response prediction and analysis capabilities of FOWT systems. The Offshore Code Comparison Collaboration, Continued with Correlation and unCertainty (OC6) project was created under the framework of the International Energy Agency to address this need and considers a three‐sided verification and validation between engineering level models, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and experimental results. In this paper, a novel floating offshore wind platform, the Stiesdal TetraSpar, is simulated using CFD under the load conditions defined by Phase IV of the OC6 project. The comparison of these CFD results against the experimental results demonstrated the ability to predict the platform response to waves when imposing the measured wave signals as input. Although validation versus experiment was largely successful, the damping behavior was impacted by uncertainties likely originating from the mooring system and sensor umbilical cable. This extensive comparison effort with multiple CFD practitioners offers insight into best practices to achieve reliable results.
- Research Organization:
- National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- National Science Foundation (NSF); USDOE; USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Wind Energy Technologies Office
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC36-08GO28308
- OSTI ID:
- 2482586
- Alternate ID(s):
- OSTI ID: 2483848
OSTI ID: 2558926
- Report Number(s):
- NREL/JA--5000-90046; e2966
- Journal Information:
- Wind Energy, Journal Name: Wind Energy Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 28; ISSN 1095-4244
- Publisher:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)Copyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United Kingdom
- Language:
- English