Optimisation of Deep Water Offshore Wind Systems

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The conflict between increasing energy demand and clean energy generation is one of the challenges we face today. This PhD research project aims to address the challenge of optimisation and resilience for Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE). ORE is recognised as a good investment, but current plans for building new ORE infrastructure is held back due to the uncertainties involved with designing offshore wind turbines (OWT) in deeper waters and with foundations in un-investigated subsea ground. Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) are a solution to the increasing costs and foundation issues within deeper water. They also have a greater energy potential, more installation space available and they generally have less restrictions than onshore wind turbines, such as visual constraints and noise impacts.The proposed research aims to develop an integrated design methodology for FOWTs that yields more resilient and robust designs. The detailed environmental load assessment combined with advanced coupled computational modelling will provide an understanding of the complex aero-hydro-elastic coupled response enabling the optimisation of future schemes. Furthermore, the effects of internal waves will be investigated to predict the impact on the stability of the FOWTs.The aims of this project therefore are firstly to develop more resilient and robust designs for deep water offshore wind systems by assessing the loads on the platforms, such as the impacts of moorings, wind, surface and internal waves, using advanced coupled computational modelling. Secondly, individual FOWTs and arrays will be optimised to accelerate the installation of large-scale FOW farms by using appropriate CFD software to simulate FOWTs and developing a MATLAB code to optimise the power output of FOWTs. And the third aims is to find a real world solution to create significantly more efficient OREs by attaching wave energy converters (WECs) to the floating platforms of FOWTs.The initial steps will involve the investigation of the loads on FOWTs, especially the internal waves, and finding an appropriate CFD software to analyse data from laboratory results provided by research partners.