Model Tests for a Floating Wind Turbine on Three

Wind energy is a promising alternate energy resource. However, the on-land wind farms are limited by space, noise, and visual pollution and, therefore, many countries build wind farms near the shore. Until now, most offshore wind farms have been built in relatively shallow water (less than 30m) with fixed tower type wind turbines. Recently, several countries have planned to move wind farms to deep water offshore locations to find stronger and steadier wind fields as compared to near shore locations. For the wind farms in deeper water, floating platforms have been proposed to support the wind turbine. The model tests described in this paper were performed at MARIN (maritime research institute netherlands) with a model setup corresponding to a 1:50 Froude scaling. The wind turbine was a scaled model of the national renewable energy lab (NREL) 5MW hor-izontal axis reference wind turbine supported by three different generic floating plat-forms: a spar, a semisubmersible, and a tension-leg platform (TLP). The wave environment used in the tests is representative of the offshore in the state of Maine. In order to capture coupling between the floating platform and the wind turbine, the 1st bending mode of the turbine tower was also modeled. The main purpose of the model test