Numerical Investigation on Dynamics of DeepCWind Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) Platform

Ahmadi, Mohammad; Yousefifard, Mahdi; Nowruzi, Hashem

doi:10.22034/ijcoe.2025.499768.1129

Numerical Investigation on Dynamics of DeepCWind Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) Platform

Document Type : Original Research Article

Authors

Mohammad Ahmadi

Mahdi Yousefifard

Hashem Nowruzi

Mechanical Engineering Department, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Babol, Iran

10.22034/ijcoe.2025.499768.1129

Abstract

Renewable energies are a crucial component of sustainable development. Offshore wind energy is an interesting clean energy alternative to fossil fuels. In floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs), a lower floating platform couples/integrates with the upper wind turbine, and the motion of each component influences the other. Therefore, understanding the dynamic behaviors of FOWT platforms is necessary for designing them in real sea states. The present paper numerically investigates the heave and pitch dynamic motions of the DeepCWind FOWT platform at three different offsets between the columns, all under regular waves. To this accomplishment, a 3D RANS-VOF model is implemented in the open-source CFD platform of OpenFOAM. The current numerical simulations of heave and pitch motions of the sandglass-type platform with appropriate accordance are validated against the existing experimental data. The main results show that increasing the offsets between the FOWT platform columns (wide model) significantly reduces the heave and pitch motions. However, the effects of decreasing the distance between the columns (i.e., a tight model) on heave and pitch motions are insignificant compared to the original model.

Keywords

FOWT

CFD

Heave and pitch motions

FPSO

OpenFOAM

Subjects