This article comes from Sandia National Lab’s Wind & Water Power news.
The University of Minnesota and Sandia National Laboratories have partnered together over the past three years for the DOE funded offshore wind FOA on the high resolution modeling of offshore wind turbines and farms. In 2013, the University of Minnesota performed experimental tests on a floating offshore wind turbine in the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory wave flume. The 1:100 scale floating offshore wind turbine experimental design was based on the Sandia National Laboratories 13.2 MW wind turbine mounted on a cylindrical barge platform. The floating offshore wind platform experimental setup is shown in Figure 2, where the platform is restricted to heave and pitch motion only since these are the primary modes of motion.
The motivation behind the experimental testing was to provide a data set for validation of the University of Minnesota’s high resolution VWIS code. In support of this project, Sandia National Laboratories provided Boundary Element Method (BEM) results for comparison to the VWIS code, and recently Sandia National Laboratories leveraged the open source WEC-Sim code (developed to simulate Wave Energy Converters in operation waves) to model the floating offshore wind experiments.The WEC-Sim code was used to model the hydrodynamic response of the floating platform, as well as the heave and pitch constraints. Results of these simulations are shown in Figures 3 and 4 (not shown) and match the experimental data well. Since the BEM solution is a low order model, WEC-Sim is a mid-fidelity code, and VWIS is a high resolution code, these results will demonstrate the comparative accuracy of different fidelity numerical codes in comparison to the experimental data.
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