OF2: coupling OpenFAST and OpenFOAM for high-fidelity aero-hydro-servo-elastic FOWT simulations

Abstract

Abstract. The numerical study of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) requires accurate integrated simulations which consider the aerodynamic, hydrodynamic, servo and elastic responses of these systems. In addition, the floating system dynamics couplings need to be included to calculate the excitation over the ensemble accurately. In this paper, a new tool has been developed for coupling NREL's aero-servo-elastic tool OpenFAST with the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) toolbox OpenFOAM. OpenFAST is used to model the rotor aerodynamics along with the flexible response of the different components of the wind turbine and the controller at each time step considering the dynamic response of the platform. OpenFOAM is used to simulate the hydrodynamics and the platform's response considering the loads from the wind turbine. The whole simulation environment is called OF2 (OpenFAST and OpenFOAM). The OC4 DeepCWind semi-submersible FOWT together with NREL's 5 MW wind turbine has been simulated using OF2 under two load cases. The purpose of coupling these tools to simulate FOWT is to obtain high-fidelity results for design purposes, thereby reducing the computational time compared with the use of CFD simulations both for the rotor aerodynamics, which usually consider rigid blades, and for the platform's hydrodynamics. The OF2 approach also allows us to include the aero-servo-elastic couplings that exist on the wind turbine along with the hydrodynamic system resolved by CFD. High-complexity situations of floating offshore wind turbines, like storms, yaw drifts, weather vanes or mooring line breaks, which imply high displacements and rotations of the floating platform or relevant non-linear effects, can be resolved using OF2, overcoming the limitation of many state-of-the-art potential hydrodynamic codes that assume small displacements of the platform. In addition, all the necessary information for the FOWT calculation and design processes can be obtained simultaneously, such as the pressure distribution at the platform components and the loads at the tower base, fairleads tension, etc. Moreover, the effect of turbulent winds and/or elastic blades could be taken into account to resolve load cases from the design and certification standards.