Development and validation of a health-aware floating offshore wind farm simulation platform: FOWLTY

Offshore wind energy is now an important game player towards the achievement of United Nations’ Sustainable Goals 7 (clean and affordable energy) and 13 (climate change) due to its huge potential but, given the harsh environment in which the turbines operate, they lead to more frequent and severe component faults compared to onshore farms. These faults result in increased maintenance and operational costs, posing a significant challenge to profitability. To mitigate these costs and maintain energy production during faults, fault detection and isolation (FDI) and fault-tolerant control (FTC) strategies have gained traction. Effective simulation tools are crucial for the development of these strategies. FOWLTY, a new simulator introduced in this paper, which derives its name from ’floating offshore wind farm simulator’ incorporating the term ’faulty’, allows users to recreate faults in wind turbine subsystems. It simplifies simulation to facilitate the development of control and estimation strategies, offering a balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. FOWLTY is compared to OpenFAST considering different scenarios, demonstrating its suitability for fault detection, diagnosis and impact mitigation through control. Additionally, a case study considering a farm composed of eight floating wind turbines is provided to show the effects of different faults.