IEA Wind Task 30 Offshore Code Comparison Collaboration Continued

The vast offshore wind resource represents a potential to use wind turbines installed offshore to power much of the world. Design standardization is difficult, however, because offshore sites vary significantly through differences in water depth, soil type, and wind and wave severity. To ensure that offshore wind turbine installations are cost effective, the use of a variety of support structure types is required. These types include fixed-bottom monopiles, gravity bases, and space-frames—such as tripods and lattice frames (“jackets”)—and floating structures. In this context, the offshore wind industry faces many new design challenges. Wind turbines are designed and analyzed using simulation tools (i.e., design codes) capable of predicting the coupled dynamic loads and responses of the system. Land-based wind turbine analysis relies on the use of aero-servo-elastic codes, which incorporate wind-inflow, aerodynamic (aero), control system (servo), and structural-dynamic (elastic) models in the time domain in a coupled simulation environment. In recent years, some of these codes have been expanded to include the additional dynamics pertinent to offshore installations, including the incident waves, sea current, hydrodynamics, and foundation dynamics of the support structure. The sophistication of these aero-hydro-servo-elastic codes, and the limited data available with which to validate them, underscore the need to verify their accuracy and correctness. Th