Experimental Investigation of Negative Damping Effects for a TLP Type Offshore Wind Turbine

Abstract

Wind power generation has been paid much attention over the years as a countermeasure against global warming. Especially in recent years, researches and developments have also been made on Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) in relatively deep offshore. Unlike Bottom-mounted Offshore Wind Turbine (BOWT), the motion characteristics of FOWT is complicated owing to coupled response of wind turbine and floating platform motions since the FOWT system is not fixed to the seabed. Due to these complexities, negative damping is one of the major problems reported for SPAR type FOWT moored by catenary chains. Negative Damping, in which the natural periodic motion is excited by blade pitch control employed for keeping the power generation constant, has to be addressed. In this paper, we discuss the negative damping of TLP type FOWT with a series of dedicated experiments. We manufactured a 1/100th-scale model TLP type FOWT model with a primary control system of the blade pitch angle for a geometrically scaled model of the 5MW wind turbine based on the NREL. At first, we formulated the mechanism for occurrence of Negative Damping and derived the conditions under which unstable fluctuations of the floating platform occurs using the motion equation. After that, we conducted scale model tank tests in wind alone and confirmed the phenomenon wherein the fluctuation of the floating platform does not converge. Finally, how dangerous such coupled motion of wind turbine and floating platform would be for real-scale FOWT is discussed.