PivotBuoy®: Single Point Mooring Wind Turbine Floating Platform Numerical Modelling and Verification

Floating wind turbines can unlock the potential of wind energy in deep water around the world. Unlike fixed-bottom or land-based wind turbines, however, the industry lacks a platform standard and there is significant opportunity for novel innovations. One such innovative concept is the X1 Wind floating wind turbine concept, featuring a PivotBuoy® Single Point Mooring (SPM) system. The SPM system integrates the mooring, anchoring system and electrical point in a single point.

By using a SPM connection, the system allows passive alignment with the wind, and therefore enables use of a downwind turbine that has secondary advantages around deflection constraints important for very large-scale offshore machines with highly flexible blades. A 1:3 scaled prototype of PivotBuoy will be installed and test in the Canary Islands test side, PLOCAN, in 2020.

Two offshore floating wind dynamic analysis software tools, OrcaFlex [1] and HAWC2 [2], are used to model and assess the performance of the scaled concept. This work presents the comparison between codes on the 1:3 prototype design simulation and response. Differences in the modeling results are discussed with respect to the influence of the features of design, as well as the modeling features of the respective codes. This work is part of the PivotBuoy project funded under the H2020 program which includes the testing of a 1:3 scaled prototype in the Canary Islands test side, PLOCAN, in 2020.