As climate change increasingly impacts our daily lives, a transition towards cleaner energy is needed. With all the growth in floating offshore wind and the planned floating wind farms (FWFs) in the next few years, we urgently need new techniques and methodologies to accommodate the differences between the fixed bottom and FWFs. This paper presents a novel methodology to decrease aerodynamic losses inside an FWF by passively relocating the downwind floating wind turbines out of the wakes.

This paper provides a comparison for a floating offshore wind turbine between the motion and loading estimated by numerical models and measurements. The floating support structure is a novel design that includes a counterweight to provide floating stability to the system. The comparison between numerical models and the measurements includes system motion, tower loads, mooring line loads, and loading within the floating support structure.

A novel hydrodynamic module of QBlade is validated on three floating offshore wind turbine concepts with experiments and two widely used simulation tools. Further, a recently proposed method to enhance the prediction of slowly varying drift forces is adopted and tested in varying met-ocean conditions. The hydrodynamic capability of QBlade matches the current state of the art and demonstrates significant improvement regarding the prediction of slowly varying drift forces with the enhanced model.

This paper presents an upscaling methodology for floating offshore wind turbine platforms using two case studies. The offshore wind turbine industry is trending towards fewer, larger offshore wind turbines within a farm, which is motivated by the per unit cost of a wind farm (including installation, interconnection, and maintenance costs). The results show the platform steel mass to be favorable with upscaling.

A sensitivity analysis determined the modeling parameters for an operating floating offshore wind turbine with the biggest impact on the ultimate and fatigue loads. The loads were the most sensitive to the standard deviation of the wind speed. Ultimate and fatigue mooring loads were highly sensitive to the current speed; only the fatigue mooring loads were sensitive to wave parameters. The largest platform rotation was the most sensitive to the platform horizontal center of gravity.