Innovative Design Of Semi-spar FOWT Foundation For 16 MW Wind Turbine

To boost the renewable energy transition, offshore wind keeps playing a important role. In terms of far reaching sea area, the floating offshore wind turbine is recognized as the key solution. Regarding the situation of Chinese offshore wind industry, the near shore sea area is continuously consumed due to the rapid development leading to a high attention of developing FOWT. Currently, China has 5 FOWT pilots installed over past 4 years and planned to have about 10 more FOWT platforms installed in near future. Most of the Chinese FOWT demonstration projects are using semi-submersible type of foundation while there are only one TLP type is planned. Although, the semi-submersible type of foundation is mature and practical proven, the inherent mechanism limits further cost reduction of the foundation. This paper proposed a design scheme, namely the semi-spar type, for a floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) equipped with a wind turbine of 16MW capacity. Based on the design, this paper has implemented a preliminary feasibility study of the semi-spar FOWT platform, mainly focusing its dynamic response performance. The feasibility study consists of three parts which are static stability analysis, dynamic analysis in frequency domain and dynamic analysis in time domain. Through these analysis, the preliminary scheme of semi-spar pilot designed for 16 MW wind turbine is studied.