Progress of recent research and development in floating offshore wind turbines

Abstract

Wind energy is playing an important role in the renewable energy sector world-wide. Whilst offshore wind energy is growing rapidly. On one hand, thousands of fixed offshore wind turbines are installed in the shallow water region. On the other hand, use of wind energy is expanding toward the deep sea that may supply greater resource with stronger and more consistent wind, also with less turbulence ambient flow. Compared with fixed offshore wind turbines, those with floating foundation will be more suitable to the deep sea area where water depth is more than 50 m and they are called floating offshore wind turbines. Therefore, floating offshore wind turbines are expected as the future of the offshore wind energy, and have been a research hotspot in the fields of wind energy and ocean engineering. The development of floating offshore wind turbines in China started a little bit later than USA, Europe and Japan, although it has been progressing in recent years. In order to facilitate the development of floating offshore wind turbines in China, the progress of international and domestic research and development are synthesized. First of all, the development process and mainstream types of floating offshore wind turbines are reviewed. Then, the sea tests of multi-MW prototypes of floating offshore wind turbine are introduced, such as Hywind, WindFloat, Goto-FOWT and Fukushima-Forward projects. After that, the technique and challenge in design, numerical simulation and model test of floating offshore wind turbines are discussed from a research standpoint. Finally, the research and development of floating offshore wind turbines in China are presented, also with the challenge and solution of floating offshore wind turbines within the local environmental limitation in China.