Passive Mooring-based Turbine Repositioning Technique for Wake Steering in Floating Offshore Wind Farms

Abstract

Power loss due to wake effects from upstream wind turbines is an important factor in the design of floating wind farms. These wake disturbances also increase fatigue loads on downstream units. Economic-driven wind farm layout optimization may culminate in non-standard, irregular configurations of offshore wind farms that deviate from conventional engineering practices. Consequently, wind farm developers are inclined towards a more geometrically coherent layout that are sub-optimal. Floating wind turbines horizontal offsets can be used to overcome wake losses. In this study, a novel method suggesting various mooring orientation methods to passively reposition the wind turbines in the farm to maximize annual energy yield. Preliminary parametric optimization demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method for standard floating wind farm designs to reduce wake effects by as much as 30% at rated wind speed compared to a baseline case, while preserving the farm’s overall uniformity.