Latest revision as of 10:54, 1 June 2026

Abstract

Structural elasticity of floating wind turbines, in integrated load analysis, are typically addressed by modelling the substructure with simplified beam models. The main reason can be found in the computational cost of the structural solver when solving the fully coupled hydroelastic problems. In this work, a reduce order method based on modal matrix reduction (MMR) is applied to reduce the computational cost. The main idea is to largely reduce the number of degrees of freedom of the structural system by retaining only those modes with significant energy. The seakeeping hydrodynamics is solved using the computational framework SeaFEM, based on the finite element method (FEM). The structural particulars are introduced into this framework to fully integrate the fluid-structure interaction. The hydroelastic model is also coupled with the wind turbine solver OpenFAST, resulting in a complete aero-hydro-servo-elastic tool for the ILA analysis of floating turbines. Moreover a methodology is proposed to identify critical conditions and hotspots based on the structural energy. An application case of the present strategy is presented for a detailed structural design of the OC4-DeepCwind. The consistency of the modal approximation and methodology are verified against the FE structural solution. It is shown the capabilities of the proposed ILA framework to perform a fully coupled and detailed structural analysis.

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