About control of bi-wind turbine single-point-moored floating offshore wind turbines

Abstract

Abstract In the last years, several novel floating offshore wind energy concepts have appeared in the market, whose goal is the reduction of floating offshore wind energy costs. Among them, bi-wind turbine floating offshore wind turbines, which use a single floating platform to place two wind turbines, are one of the most promising ones. However, they face some challenges in their full deployment. For example, depending on the wind direction, one of the rotors could be found downstream of the other one and hence be affected by its wake. To avoid this, the turbines of this type of systems do not use a conventional active yaw mechanism, but a single-point-mooring configuration, to allow the platform rotation around the vertical axis. This way, the alignment of the rotors with the wind can be achieved, avoiding wake issues. However, as stated in the literature, at least for single-rotor wind turbines, this alignment is not straightforward and some yaw drift could appear in the platform. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to confirm that this platform yaw drift could also arise in bi-wind turbine single-point-moored floating wind energy systems, and analyse its impact in terms of performance, while shedding some light on the performance improvements when applying new advanced control strategies.