OC6 Phase IV: Validation of CFD Models for Stiesdal TetraSpar Floating Offshore Wind Platform: Article No. e2966

With only a few floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) farms deployed anywhere in the world, FOWT technology is still in its infancy, building on a modicum of real-world experience to advance the nascent industry. To support further development, engineers rely heavily on modeling tools to accurately portray the behavior of these complex systems under realistic environmental conditions. This reliance creates a need for verification and validation of such tools to improve reliability of load and dynamic response prediction and analysis capabilities of FOWT systems. The Offshore Code Comparison Collaboration, Continued with Correlation and unCertainty (OC6) project was created under the framework of the International Energy Agency to address this need and considers a three sided verification and validation between engineering level models, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and experimental results. In this work, a novel floating offshore wind platform, the Stiesdal TetraSpar, is simulated using CFD under the load conditions defined by Phase IV of the OC6 project. The comparison of these CFD results to the experimental results allows for the validation of the models. This model validation also enables a more in-depth analysis of the interactions and dynamic response of FOWTs under realistic conditions and offers insight into best practices to achieve accurate results.