Abstract
Floating structures are viable alternatives for supporting wind turbines in deep water. Design of floating support structures is a challenging task, and a design evaluation requires considerations of costs and system performance.
An approach for evaluation of semi-submersible floaters has been developed in this paper. A braceless semi-submersible floater is selected and this floater is designed to support a 5-MW wind turbine in the North Sea. The evaluation framework consists of automatic modeling and numerical simulations in open-source tools. A Python-SALOME-NEMOH interface is used to obtain the hydrodynamic properties for geometries defined by various variables. The geometries are subjected to three performance constraints related to the static platform pitch, metacentric height, nacelle acceleration and wind loads in operating and parked conditions. Finally, the geometries are evaluated using two combined objective functions related to material cost and nacelle acceleration, and the Pareto Fronts are discussed. This work contributes to developing efficient design optimization methods for floating structures.
