Layout analysis for floating offshore wind farms considering wake interference

Offshore wind farms have been gradually developed as deep-sea and large-scale farms in search of abundant and stable wind energy. Compared with fixed wind farms, floating offshore wind farms require additional consideration of wave loads, cable loads, and platform motions. To accomplish a fast and accurate simulation of floating wind farms, a coupled analytical model is proposed in this paper. This model couples platform motions, wake interference, single turbine dynamics, and wind farm modeling. The performance of wind farms with different layouts is simulated and compared, and the turbine spacing and wind farm layout angle are optimized. By studying an 80 MW floating wind farm in a certain sea area, it is found that a reasonable layout angle can improve the overall wind farm efficiency and increase the annual power generation by up to 3.61 GW h per year (1% improvement).