Loads and motions for a spar-supported floating offshore wind turbine

An offshore wind turbine supported by a spar buoy floating platform is the subject of this study on tower and rotor extreme loads. The platform, with a 120-meter draft and assumed to be sited in 320 meters of water, supports a 5 MW wind turbine. A baseline model for this turbine developed at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is employed in stochastic response simulations. The support platform, along with the mooring system consisting of three catenary lines, chosen for loads modeling, is based on the "Hywind" floating wind turbine concept. Our interest lies in gaining an understanding of the dynamic coupling between the support platform motion and the turbine loads. We first investigate short-term response statistics using stochastic simulation for a range of different environmental wind and wave conditions. From this study, we identify a few "controlling" environmental conditions for which long-term turbine load statistics and probability distributions are established.