Aerodynamic Behavior of a Floating Offshore Wind Turbine

The flowfield around the rotor blades of a wind turbine is extremely complex due to the occurrence of several aerodynamic phenomena. It is all the more true for floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs), for which the six rigid-body motions of the floating platform can induce blade-wake interactions. Therefore conventional numerical approaches for wind turbine applications, such as Blade Element Momentum Theory, may be questionable for an accurate prediction of floating wind turbine aerodynamic loads. Consequently, the current paper investigates the aerodynamic behavior of an FOWT subjected to several idealized prescribed motions, representative of a wave movement, based on computational fluid dynamics simulations. These results, obtained on the NREL 5-MW wind turbine, are compared with previous results found in the literature and analyzed to provide a better understanding of the involved aerodynamic phenomena.