Fatigue Load Minimization for a Position-Controlled Floating Offshore Wind Turbine

Abstract

Floating offshore wind farm control via real-time turbine repositioning has a potential in significantly enhancing the wind farm efficiency. Although the wind farm power capture increase by moving platforms with aerodynamic force has been verified in a recent study, the investigation and mitigation of the fatigue damage caused by such aerodynamic force manipulated for turbine repositioning is still necessary. To respond to these needs, this paper presents fatigue load controller design for a semisubmersible floating offshore wind turbine, particularly when the turbine position is controlled by the nacelle yaw angle. At various turbine positions determined by nacelle yaw angles and average wind speeds, the designed controller manipulates three blade pitch angles individually and minimizes the fatigue load at the tower base. As the individual blade pitch controller, the linear quadratic regulator is optimized through surrogate optimization by simulating the turbine disturbed by various turbulent wind and irregular wave profiles, and then by searching for a minimum fatigue from these simulations. Fatigue load analysis with the optimized controller leads to the main contribution of this paper, that is, to demonstrate that turbine repositioning can be achieved while allowing for the inclusion of a fatigue reducing controller. In fact, when operating the FOWT with the position controller and fatigue load controller, the fatigue damage at the tower base is reduced by about 40% for different nacelle yaw angles. This result supports the feasibility of position-controlled wind turbines to optimize the wind farm efficiency, thereby drastically reducing the offshore wind energy cost.