Floaters upscaling for multi-megawatt floating wind turbines

Abstract

Abstract The floating wind industry requires wind turbines with increasing power ratings, which will require bigger platforms. However, few floater concepts are publicly available for numerical simulation of future wind turbines. To overcome this limit, this work proposes a fast and straightforward upscaling methodology to upscale already available floating platforms to greater wind turbine power ratings. The methodology does not aim to optimize the floater design, but it can generate realistic floater data for preliminary numerical simulations. The methodology is applied here to four floaters: a semisubmersible, a barge, a TLP and a spar. The platforms are upscaled for a 15 MW wind turbine and a specific deployment site. The upscaling methodology is adapted for each floater since some differences arise from one platform to the other. Whenever possible a comparison with already existing 15 MW substructures is proposed and commented.