Design and Experimental Evaluation of Thrust-Matched Blade Model for FOWT Wind Tunnel Test

The scaled model test is currently the most reliable approach for the conceptual design and experimental validation of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWT). In current scaled model tests, the common practice of designing scaled blades using low-Reynolds airfoils fails to account for turbulent wind conditions and wind profiles identical to those of the full-scale prototype and lacks an explicit criterion for airfoil selection. This paper presents a refined design framework for scaled blade models that ensures thrust similarity to a prototype turbine within the test wind-speed range of the FOWT wind tunnel test and under the turbulent conditions and wind profiles corresponding to the prototype turbine. Applying this framework, a set of thrust-matched scaled blades for a 20 MW floating offshore wind turbine was designed, and a corresponding wind tunnel test was conducted to test the accuracy of thrust similarity in this design method. The results of the wind tunnel test show that the time-averaged thrust error between the scaled model and the prototype is less than 1.52% across the entire wind-speed range. The effectiveness of the design in reproducing target mean thrust under turbulent inflow is confirmed, providing an available framework for FOWT wind tunnel testing.