High-efficiency wind-farm-scale wave force estimation for preliminary design of offshore wind installations

Abstract

Many coastal wind farms are subject to a complex hydrodynamic environment due to bathymetry variations and irregular coastlines. The wave height statistical information does not linearly correlate to the wave loads on wind turbines. Fast calculations to transfer the sea state information to wave loads information are needed for the optimisation of wind farm configurations. In this article, the authors propose to use the efficient and flexible fully nonlinear potential flow (FNPF) model REEF3D::FNPF to provide large-scale wave environment and force information. An arbitrary Eulerian-Lagrangian (ALE) method is used to calculate the wave loads on the offshore wind turbines using the non-linear hydrodynamic information from REEF3D::FNPF. The hydrodynamic simulations and force calculations are integrated and performed at run time. The force spectra at all wind turbines in an entire wind farm are obtained directly from the simulations in a computationally- and time-efficient manner.