Abstract
Specific engineering tools are used to design Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWT). These so-called aero-hydro-servo-elastic solvers simulate the coupled behaviour of the turbine subjected to wind with the floater motion due to waves, including elasticity of the whole structure. The implemented hydrodynamic forces rely on a strong Oil&Gas background and include potential flow theory and empirical laws, such as Morison forces. The undergoing study aims at re-evaluating the validity range of such theories, when applied to FOWT. To do so, CFD simulations will be run to model wave propagation and interaction with a FOWT floater. Hydrodynamic forces will be extracted from the CFD simulations and compared to current hydrodynamic theories.
A fixed cylinder in regular second order deep water waves (steepness of 0.9) is simulated and results are validated against experiments [1]. This basic first case implemented with Open-FOAM using waves2Foam library allows to master regular wave generation and interaction with a rather simple structure, running multiple simulations. Convergence (mesh refinement, time step) and parameterization (numerical schemes, turbulence models) studies are carried out to ensure controlled wave generation. An accurate Numerical Wave Tank (NWT) is finally obtained. However, the resolution of air/water interface with Volume Of Fluid (VOF) MULES method seems to be responsible for extreme air velocities on crests resulting in wave damping. This phenomena is solved by decreasing time step. Hydrodynamic forces on the cylinder match experiments with an error below 3%. As the flow is turbulent (Re = 105), a turbulence model is included in the simulation giving results rather close to the ones obtained without turbulence model.
