State-Space Realization of the Wave-Radiation Force Within FAST

Several methods have been proposed in the literature to find a state-space model for the wave-radiation forces. In this paper, we compared four methods, two in the frequency domain and two in the time domain. The frequency-response function and the impulse response of the resulting state-space models were compared against those derived from the numerical code WAMIT.

A new state-space module was implemented within FAST, an offshore wind turbine computer-aided engineering tool, and we compared the results against the previously implemented numerical convolution method. The results agreed between the two methods, with a significant reduction in required computational time when using the new state-space module.