Floating Wind Energy is a key technology that will help us meet the requirements for a renewable and carbon-free electrical system. As the field is developing at a rapid pace, new concepts are emerging. To support this innovation, accurate and reliable hydro-aeroelastic computational tools are essential for lowering costs, de-risking designs and to reduce the time to market. However, as turbines become larger, supporting floating structures must also scale up, which challenges tradi-tional physical modeling approaches. Therefore, new and innovative validation strategies are needed.
The OC7 project, fifth in a series of IEA tasks, aims to validate aeroelastic computational tools against experiments and to establish best modeling practices. OC7 focuses on 3 key areas. 1. Viscous hydrodynamic loads - key for predicting turbine response to waves, 2. Floater struc-tural flexibility - increasingly relevant due to the increase of the size of machines 3. Wind farm aerodynamics - how do wakes interact with neighboring floating turbines. The project brings to-gether industrial and academic partners to benchmark their computational tools against experi-ments and results from higher fidelity tools.
The main project outcomes are 1. Peer-reviewed high-quality validation papers 2.Industry work-shops on modeling best practices 3. Technical reports, including modeling guidelines.