Work Package 4. Advanced floater and moorings systems.
The objectives of this Work Package, which is led by NTNU, are:
• To develop, verify and validate a computer model to predict the behaviour of the turbine
under various operating conditions.
• To use the findings from the tests and numerical simulations to assess the behaviour of
very large floating wind turbines.
• To understand how to optimize the design of future floating wind turbines.
The test platform has initially been chosen in a manner so that it can shed as much light as possible on the
behaviour of a very large wind turbine, say a 10 MW unit. The comparisons between these alternatives cannot
be done by straightforward use of scaling laws, since e.g. mass, mooring forces and resonant periods scale
differently and since of course the characteristic parameters for the wind and wave fields cannot be changed by
human action in prototype testing. However the predicted behaviour in our computer models can be calibrated
and verified against measured behaviour, so that these models can be used with confidence for large scale wind turbines.
The key point in this respect is to make sure that the same type of behaviour will occur for the test platform as for
a very large turbine. This decision must be based on present knowledge of what is critical and will be supported
by the results of the computer models.
