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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Wenxian YangORCiD
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a conference proceedings (inc. abstract) that has been published in its final definitive form by IET, 2018.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
Floating wind turbines are attracting increasing interest in recent years attributed to their lots of advantages in transportation, installation and decommission. However, to maintain their motion stability on the premise of not sacrificing output power is challenging, especially in shallow water. In order to explore a viable solution for this issue, a potential motion stabilization measure is proposed and verified in this paper through conducting a series of numerical researches with the aid of SESAM. In the research, the numerical model of a spar-supported 5 MW floating turbine was developed first to investigate its motion stability in different depths water and under different wave conditions. Then, a new concept of motion stabilizer is proposed with the inspiration of the great contribution of heave plate to suppressing the heave motion of spar structures. But different from the application of a single heave plate, the proposed stabilizer consists of multiple number of heave plates, which are connected to the body of the spar structure via arms. The influences of both the number of heave plates and their arm length on motion stabilization results are then investigated in the numerical research, allowing to explore an optimal design of the proposed stabilizer. Considering the dynamic motions of a floating turbine is mainly affected by sea waves, the motion stabilizing capability of the proposed stabilizer is investigated over a wide range of wave period 4-36 s. It has been found that after applying the proposed motion stabilizer, both the pitch and heave motions of the floating turbine are successfully suppressed within the most range of wave period, especially when the wave period exceeds 12 s. As the average wave period in the North Sea is 15-20 s, it is reasonable to believe that the proposed motion stabilizer is a promising tool to adapt the existing spar-supported floating turbine to the application in nearshore shallow water.
Author(s): Yang W, Tian W, Peng Z, Wei K, Feng Y, Qiu Y
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: 7th International Conference on Renewable Power Generation (RPG 2018)
Year of Conference: 2018
Pages: 1-7
Print publication date: 27/09/2018
Online publication date: 27/09/2018
Acceptance date: 26/08/2018
Date deposited: 01/10/2018
Publisher: IET
