Global Sizing of the WindFloat for a 10 MW Generic Wind Turbine

Abstract

It is now widely accepted that, due to significant economies of scale, the levelized cost of energy in offshore wind industry decreases as the turbine size and rated power increases. For offshore wind turbines, fixed and floating foundations can be quite complimentary when sites span a large water depth range. This paper presents the new WindFloat semisubmersible design supporting a 10MW generic wind turbine made by DTU [1]. This study evaluates the initial global performance of the WindFloat 10MW hull. In addition, RAO and frequency domain accelerations at the nacelle are presented. A comparison of the OpenFAST model, that we plan to use in all the future analysis, will be conducted against the benchmarked OrcaFAST model used by PPI and validated against the WindFloat prototype [2].