The stability of wakes of floating wind turbines

Abstract

Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) are subjected to platform motion induced by wind and wave loads. The oscillatory movement trigger vortex instabilities, modifying the wake structure and influencing the flow reaching downstream wind turbines. In this work, the wake of a FOWT is analyzed by means of numerical simulations and a comparison with linear stability theory. Two simplified models based on the stability of vortices are developed for all degrees of freedom of turbine motion. In our numerical simulations, the wind turbine blades are modeled as actuator lines and a spectral-element method with low dispersion and dissipation is employed to study the evolution of the perturbations. The turbine motion excites vortex instability modes predicted by the linear stability of helical vortices. The flow structures that are formed in the non-linear regime are a consequence of the growth of these modes and preserve some of the characteristics that can be explained and predicted by the linear theory. The number of vortices that interact and the growth rate of disturbances are well predicted by a simple stability model of a two-dimensional row of vortices. For all types of motion, the highest growth rate is observed when the frequency of motion is one and a half the frequency of rotation of the turbine that induces the out-of-phase vortex pairing mechanism. For lower frequencies of motion, several vortices coalesce to form large flow structures, which cause the high amplitude of oscillations in the streamwise velocities, which may increase fatigue or induce high amplitude motion on downstream turbines.