Influence of Hydrodynamic Modeling Assumptions on Floating Wind Turbine Behaviour

This paper aims to highlight the key physical aspects that govern the dynamic behavior of a trifloater based floating wind turbine and the modeling assumptions — with a focus on hydrodynamics modeling and platform/tower interface flexibility — required to properly take into account the coupled hydrodynamics and aerodynamics effects in the fatigue analysis. Three selected load cases are simulated with different hydrodynamics models and the results are compared to each other. On this specific floating structure, Morison formulation seems to provide very similar results compared to other hydrodynamic modeling approaches based on potential flow theory and a more consistent way to model the floater damping. The use of a hybrid formulation including Morison damping on the columns instead of a quadratic damping matrix is an interesting alternative since it gathers the advantages of the different models.