High-fidelity Numerical Simulations of Offshore Floating Wind Turbines in Atmospheric Boundary Layer Flows and Ocean Waves

Jinhui Yan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

The current trend in offshore wind energy development is to go from land-based designs to floating-based designs. Offshore floating wind turbines have several advantages over land-based wind turbines, including higher energy generation efficiency, bigger size, and less visual and noise impact. However, the dynamical response of offshore floating wind turbines due to combined turbulent wind loading and ocean wave excitation is more complicated, which raise serious concern to the gigantic turbine system with the anticipated service life of more than 20 years. The proposal targets to utilize the in-house free-surface fluid-structure interaction (FSI) code and the in-house atmospheric boundary layer flow solver, both developed in the PI's group, to simulate full-scale offshore floating wind turbines subjected to realistic atmospheric boundary layer flows and ocean waves. These advanced simulations will provide meaningful guidance for the development of offshore floating wind turbines. Due to the large scale of the problem, such high-fidelity simulations can only be performed on supercomputers such as Blue Waters.