Aeroelastic analysis of a floating offshore wind turbine in platform-induced surge motion using a fully coupled CFD-MBD method

Abstract

Modern offshore wind turbines are susceptible to blade deformation because of their increased size and the recent trend of installing these turbines on floating platforms in deep sea. In this paper, an aeroelastic analysis tool for floating offshore wind turbines is presented by coupling a high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver with a general purpose multibody dynamics code, which is capable of modelling flexible bodies based on the nonlinear beam theory. With the tool developed, we demonstrated its applications to the NREL 5 MW offshore wind turbine with aeroelastic blades. The impacts of blade flexibility and platform-induced surge motion on wind turbine aerodynamics and structural responses are studied and illustrated by the CFD results of the flow field, force, and wake structure. Results are compared with data obtained from the engineering tool FAST v8.