Towing Resistance and Design of a Towing Scheme for a Floating Wind Turbine

Abstract

Towing operation is an important part of the transportation and installation of offshore floating wind turbines. The study of towing resistance is of great significance to the efficient construction of floating wind turbine towing. This paper takes the floating wind turbine model designed by “China Energy Construction Group Guangdong Electric Power Design Institute Co., Ltd.” as the research object, uses STAR-CCM+ 2302 software to establish the computational domain model of floating wind turbine towing, and compares it with the existing physical model experimental results and empirical formula calculation results to verify the accuracy of the CFD resistance prediction method; then the method is used to calculate the still water towing resistance of the new large-megawatt floating wind turbine at different drafts and speeds, and according to the resistance calculation results, the integrated towing system of the floating wind turbine is established in ANSYS-AQWA (Version 2023 R1), the influence of environmental loads on towing resistance is analyzed, and the selection basis of tugboat is proposed. The results show that towing resistance is closely related to the draft, speed, and foundation configuration of the wind turbine platform. In order to ensure the safety of the towing system, the speed should be kept below 4 kn. The experimental results are compared and verified that the calculation results of this method are close to the experimental values and the empirical formula calculation values, which realizes the rapid prediction of the towing resistance of the floating wind turbine and provides guidance for the towing operation of the offshore floating wind turbine platform.

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