Performance of a Passive Tuned Liquid Column Damper for Floating Wind Turbines

The motivation of the present paper is to show the proof-of-concept of a passive Tuned Liquid Column Damper (TLCD) for floating wind turbines, which increases the platform pitch damping and power production under wind and wave excitations. As the first step, a reliable TLCD model is implemented and coupled with a reduced order floating wind turbine model. Here, the TLCD is modelled as a second order system which is known for ships, whereas the structural model is a coupled aero-hydro-servo-elastic model with five degrees of freedom. The results show that the TLCD is able to damp the platform resonances but to a limited extent, which is inline the findings of previous research. However, the improved platform pitch stability allows a larger blade pitch control bandwidth, which is normally limited by the underdamped soft support platform. Therefore, by introducing the passive TLCD into the floating wind turbine system, a better power production is achieved.