Experimental and numerical analysis of a TLP floating offshore wind turbine

This paper describes an experimental and numerical investigation of the Iberdrola TLP wind turbine concept, TLPWIND, in realistic wind and wave conditions. The TLP was coupled to the NREL 5 MW reference turbine and was designed to operate in a water depth of 70 m. The test campaign included free oscillation tests, tests in regular and irregular waves and simulated wind conditions.
A Software-in-the-loop approach was adopted to account for the time-varying aerodynamic forces produced by the turbine during the physical experiments. The effect of wind was found to have a significant contribution to the overall response of the platform whilst variation in wave conditions was found to have a relatively small effect on the platform response.
A comparison of results from physical and numerical simulations show that, the numerical predictions from FAST were very close to the results obtained from the experiments in some cases, but in other cases the numerical model failed to accurately predict the platform response.
The results from both studies show the benefits of such TLP structures in terms of motions which are vital to obtain a high power output from a floating offshore wind turbine.