Concept Design Verification of a Semi-submersible Floating Wind Turbine Using Coupled Simulations

A concept design has been made of a GustoMSC Tri-Floater semi-submersible equipped with the NREL 5 MW reference wind turbine. To capture the interaction between wind loads on the pitch controlled rotor and motions of the floating structure, aero- hydro-servo-elastic simulations have been performed using Ansys AQWA coupled to PHATAS. Based on the simulation results, it is concluded that the Tri-Floater design meets the requirements regarding motions, accelerations and mooring loads. Furthermore, it is shown that uncoupled frequency domain analysis can be applied to assess the wave frequency component of the global motion response in early design stages, where computationally demanding coupled analyses are less practical.