Towards credible CFD simulations for floating offshore wind turbines

Abstract

The credibility in the results needs to be demonstrated in order to be able to use computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as an engineering tool. This may be obtained by sufficient verification and validation studies involving error and uncertainty quantification. This study investigates how to perform credible CFD simulations of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs). Three methods to estimate discretisation errors were compared for three different problems related to FOWTs: wave propagation in 2D, wave loads on a circular cylinder, and surge decay of a semi-submersible FOWT. The three discretisation error estimation methods are a least-squares formulation using the observed order of convergence in combination with a data quality measure for different spatial and temporal refinement, another least-squares fit method using the theoretical order of convergence for constant Courant number grid refinement studies, and the factor of safety method applying a ratio between observed and theoretical order of convergence. We compared the final results to an analytical solution of the 2D wave signal, and to experimental data for the wave loads and surge decay motions, for validation purposes. The results of this work show the advantages and disadvantages of the three error estimation methods. The uncertainty bars for the discretisation uncertainty of the numerical simulations were mostly larger than the comparison error with the model test data and analytical solution.