Wind is the fastest growing renewable energy source, increasing at an annual rate of 25% with a worldwide installed capacity of 74 GW in 2007. The vast majority of wind power is generated from onshore wind farms. Their growth is however limited by the lack of inexpensive land near major population centers and the visual pollution caused by large wind turbines. Wind energy generated from offshor...

There are many advantages of floating wind turbines in deep waters, however, there are also significant technological challenges associated with it too. The dynamic excitation of wind and waves will induce excessive motions along each of the 6 degrees of freedom (6-DOF) of the floating platforms. These motions will then be transferred to the turbine, and directly impact the turbines’ performanc...

The current key challenge in the floating offshore wind turbine industry and research is on designing economic floating systems that can compete with fixed-bottom offshore turbines in terms of levelized cost of energy. The preliminary platform design, as well as early experimental design assessments, are critical elements in the overall design process. In this contribution, a brief review of cu...

This study combines multi-year mesoscale modeling results, validated using offshore buoys with highresolution bathymetry to create a wind energy resource assessment for offshore California (CA). The siting of an offshore wind farm is limited by water depth, with shallow water being generally preferable economically. Acceptable depths for offshore wind farms are divided into three categories: 20...

The use of wind power is in a period of rapid growth worldwide and wind energy systems have emerged as a promising technology for utilizing offshore wind resources for the large scale generation of electricity. Drawing upon the maturity of wind turbine and floater technologies developed by the wind energy and oil and gas industries, respectively, large offshore wind energy systems have been dev...

A free-vortex wake (FVW) model is developed in this paper to analyse the unsteady aerodynamic performance of offshore floating wind turbines. A time-marching algorithm of third-order accuracy is applied in the FVW model. Owing to the complex floating platform motions, the blade inflow conditions and the positions of initial points of vortex filaments, which are different from the fixed wind tur...

Offshore winds are generally stronger and more consistent than winds on land, making the offshore environment attractive for wind energy development. A large part of the offshore wind resource is however located in deep water, where floating turbines are the only economical way of harvesting the energy. The design of offshore floating wind turbines relies on the use of modeling tools that can s...

In this study, two types of floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) systems were proposed: a traditional tension leg platform (TLP) type and a new TLP type with additional mooring chains. They were both based on the National Renewable Energy Laboratory 5 MW offshore wind turbine model. Taking the coupled effect of dynamic response of the top wind turbine, tower support structure and lower mooring...

In the background of the offshore wind turbine monitoring applications, we analyzed the characteristics of the offshore wind turbine monitor and gave the architecture of the offshore wind turbine monitor system. We designed the system model of blade wear and vibration in offshore wind turbine, and combined with energy efficient data aggregation algorithm based on the specific application to mon...