Enabling Floating Offshore VAWT Design by Coupling OWENS and OpenFAST

Vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs) have a long history, with wide variety of turbine archetypes that been designed and tested since the 1970s. While few utility-scale VAWTs currently exist, placement generator near base could make advantageous over tradition horizontal-axis for floating offshore applications via reduced platform costs improved scaling potential. However, there are numerical design analysis tools available VAWTs. One existing engineering toolset aero-hydro-servo-elastic simulation is Offshore Wind ENergy Simulator (OWENS), but its current modeling capability systems non-standard not ideal. This article describes how OWENS has coupled to several OpenFAST modules update improve discusses verification these new capabilities features. The results test agree well parallel simulation, validating in VAWT applications. These developments will enable optimization future.