Installation of offshore wind turbines: A technical review

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Load mitigation method for wind turbines during emergency shutdowns

Wind turbines experience countless shutdowns during their lifetimes. A shutdown is a transient process characterised by a pitch-to-feather manoeuvre of three blades. Such a pitch manoeuvre is often collective, open-loop, and can substantially slow the rotor speed within several seconds. However, undesirable structural responses may arise because of the imbalanced aerodynamic loads acting on the rotor. To address this issue, this paper proposes a method that actively adjusts the individual pitch rate of each blade during an emergency shutdown. This method is founded on a minimal intervention principle and uses the blade-root bending moment measurements as the only inputs. The control objective is to minimise the differences in the blade-root flapwise bending moment among the three blades during the shutdown. Using a high-fidelity aeroelastic model, we demonstrate the controller performance under representative steady wind conditions with vertical wind shear. Compared with the baseline shutdown strategy, the proposed method effectively reduces the maximum nontorque bending moment at the main shaft and the tower bottom bending moment; the reductions vary between 10% and 40% under the investigated conditions. The present work can be further extended to reduce structural fatigue damages or to handle complex loading scenarios of offshore wind turbines during shutdowns.publishedVersio

Mooring Analysis of a Dual-Spar Floating Wind Farm With a Shared Line

acceptedVersio

Metocean conditions at two Norwegian sites for development of offshore wind farms

This paper examines metocean data from NORA3, a state-of-the-art wind and wave hindcast dataset for Northern Europe. Two offshore Norwegian areas, Utsira Nord (UN) and Sørlige Nordsjø II (SN2), are investigated. Both areas offer significant potential for the offshore wind sector. UN is situated in deep-sea water, suitable for floating offshore wind turbines. In contrast, SN2 lies in intermediate waters and ranks among the North Sea's most promising regions allocated for offshore wind. Data from NORA3, originally on a 3-km resolution grid, are resampled into unstructured grids spanning from 1982 to 2022. This refined dataset offers a climatology time scale with superior spatial and temporal resolution compared to most other hindcast and reanalysis databases. The study examines mean wind speed and direction across seven levels, ranging from 10~m to 750~m above the surface. Analyses of extreme wind and wave conditions have been conducted. Results reveal that UN experiences higher extreme wave heights than SN2 while the extreme wind speeds may be substantially larger at SN2 than UN. Moreover, this study establishes joint distribution models that encompass several parameters, including mean wind speed, significant wave height, wave spectral peak period, and direction difference between wind and waves. Thus, this metocean data is valuable for designing and analyzing floating wind farms over their lifecycles.publishedVersio

Influence of variability and uncertainty of wind and waves on fatigue damage of a floating wind turbine drivetrain

publishedVersio

Dynamic analysis of a dual-spar floating offshore wind farm with shared moorings in extreme environmental conditions

The concept of a shared mooring system was proposed to reduce mooring and anchoring costs. Shared moorings also add complexity to the floating offshore wind farm system and pose design challenges. To understand the system dynamics, this paper presents a dynamic analysis for a dual-spar floating offshore wind farm with a shared mooring system in extreme environmental conditions. First, a numerical model of the floating offshore wind farm was established in a commercial simulation tool. Then, time-domain simulations were performed for the parked wind farm under extreme wind and wave conditions. A sensitivity study was carried out to investigate the influence of loading directions and shared line mooring properties. To highlight the influence of the shared line, the results were compared to those of a single spar floating wind turbine, and larger platform motions and higher tension loads in single lines are observed for the wind farm with shared moorings. The loading direction affects the platform motions and mooring response of the floating offshore wind farm. Comparing the investigated loading directions to the 0-deg loading direction, the variation of mean mooring tension at the fairlead is up to 84% for single lines and 16% for the shared line. The influence of the shared line properties in the platform motions and the structural responses is limited. These findings improve understanding of the dynamic characteristics of floating offshore wind farms with a shared mooring system.Dynamic analysis of a dual-spar floating offshore wind farm with shared moorings in extreme environmental conditionspublishedVersio

Influence of Aerodynamic Loads on a Dual-Spar Floating Offshore Wind Farm With a Shared Line in Parked Conditions

The concept of a shared mooring system, in which adjacent wind turbines are coupled by sharing mooring lines, has been proposed to reduce the mooring costs of floating offshore wind farms. This work investigates the influence of aerodynamic loads on a floating offshore wind farm of two spar wind turbines connected with a shared line in extreme environmental conditions. A case study is performed for the floating offshore wind farm under parked conditions using a numerical simulation tool. The environmental conditions are determined from environmental contours with a return period of 50 years. Turbulent wind and irregular waves are simulated in dynamic analyses. Wind and waves are aligned and two loading directions are considered. Floater motions and structural response are analyzed. The influence of aerodynamic loads is studied by comparing the simulation results under both wind and waves with those under wave-only. It is concluded that the aerodynamic loads affect the horizontal motions of floating offshore wind turbines, the mooring response and the tower-base bending moment significantly in extreme environmental conditions, especially when the loading direction is 90 deg. The findings from this study improve understanding of the design loads of shared mooring systems.acceptedVersio

Modeling of a Shared Mooring System for a Dual-Spar Configuration

Author's accepted manuscript.acceptedVersio