MS#08.4 Wake interactions in floating wind farms

A. BIANCHINI¹, R.B. CAL², A. FONTANELLA³, D. GAYME⁴, C. MENEVEAU⁴, S. MUGGIASCA³
¹ Università degli Studi di Firenze|² Portland State University|³ Politecnico di Milano|⁴ Johns Hopkins University

Floating wind special features

The vast wind energy potential above deep ocean waters has motivated serious consideration of floating wind plants. Essential elements needed to enable both improved reliability and cost reductions are better understanding and efficient prediction tools for the complex fluid dynamical interactions between different types of ocean waves, turbulent winds in the marine atmospheric boundary layer (MABL), and multiple turbine wakes in floating wind farms.
Turbine wakes play a central role in determining wind farm power and floating turbine wakes are influenced not only by atmospheric conditions but also by wave states and platform motions, thus leading to a multitude of turbine-wind-wave interaction scenarios. Such couplings can lead to not only increased or reduced power output, but also to power and load fluctuations at dominant frequencies related to the farm layout, structural properties, and wind/wave forcing conditions.
These phenomena are not fully understood and difficult to account for in the state-of-the-art tools due to the complexity in accurately representing the many interactions involved. This mini-symposium seeks to assemble presentations that focus on the flow dynamics of floating offshore wind turbine arrays in order to shed light on the problem using tools at various levels of fidelity, investigate the interaction between platform motions and wakes (both with experiments and simulations), and validate numerical tools with measurement data.