Effects of Second-Order Hydrodynamic Forces on Floating Offshore Wind Turbines

Relative to first-order, second-order wave-excitation loads are known to cause significant motions and additional loads in offshore oil and gas platforms. The design of floating offshore wind turbines was partially inherited from the offshore oil and gas industry. Floating offshore wind concepts have been studied with powerful aero-hydro-servo-elastic tools; however, most of the existing work on floating offshore wind turbines has neglected the contribution of second-order wave-excitation loads. As a result, this paper presents a computationally efficient methodology to consider these loads within FAST, a wind turbine computer-aided engineering tool developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The method implemented was verified against the commercial OrcaFlex tool, with good agreement, and low computational time. A reference floating offshore wind turbine was studied under several wind and wave load conditions, including the effects of second-order slow-drift and sum-frequency loads. Preliminary results revealed that these loads excite the turbine's natural frequencies, namely the surge and pitch natural frequencies.