Benchmarking study of 10 MW TLB floating offshore wind turbine

Abstract This paper presents a benchmarking study of four floating wind platform’ motion and dynamic tension responses to verify an innovative design with the intention of overall cost reduction of a durable, reliable, safe design. An aero-hydro-servo-elastic code is applied to benchmark a 10 MW tension leg buoy (TLB) floating wind turbine to the current leading technology types for floating offshore wind platforms, specifically spar buoy, Semi-submersible and tension leg platform (TLP) floating wind turbines. This study assumes that the platforms will deploy in the northern region of the North Sea, with a water depth of 110 m under various environmental conditions, including wind field descriptions covering uniform wind to fluctuating turbulent wind. The obtained dynamic response results showed low motion responses for the TLB platform for all design load cases. More specifically, the TLB surge and pitch motion responses are insignificant under both operational and survival conditions, allowing decreased spacing between individual wind turbines and increasing wind farms' total energy generation capacity. An additional benefit is that the wind turbine systems can be installed without significant pitch modification to the control system. The TLB platform is less complex which simplifies the construction process and has the potential for significant cost reductions.