Numerical Prototype of the EDF Blyth Floating Wind Farm

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This project aims to develop an in-house numerical prototype that will include hydro-aero-elastic loads analysis coupled with both wave and current loads, taking into account second-order nonlinear effects. This model will use dynamic analysis for estimating the stability and fatigue of a floating offshore wind project utilising a semi-submersible foundation and a 15 MW turbine. The overall structure analysis will be carried out for real site-specific sea states provided by the hind cast database ANEMOC3. Second order wave effects will be included as they can be crucial, as already proved in literature using Quadratic Transfer Functions.The development of this tool, from hereafter named 'Numerical Prototype', will use complete directional spectra and calculate loads and DoF responses of the turbine for every 3-hour sea state over its 25-year lifetime. This computationally costly method, summing up to 73000 simulations of sea states, aims to study the inaccuracies that are inherent to the method of bins that is most used in industry. As already discussed in literature, the method of bins has fatigue calculation uncertainties concerning the point of representation of bins, the excluded sea states from the overall calculation and the bin size. In addition, the Numerical Method avoids further assumptions on spectra directionality, where only one or two main directions are considered, and on wind shear and turbulence calculations, where assumptions are made due to lack of information of surface roughness length and surface friction velocity.