Mooring fatigue verification of the WindCrete for a 15 MW wind turbine

Abstract

LCOE reduction in FOWTs is heading to larger wind turbines in order to increase power production and capacity. NREL and DTU have recently developed a 15MW reference wind turbine, which can be used to validate the platform concepts for the next generation of wind turbines. Increasing the power of wind turbines leads to larger platforms due to the need to withstand the increase of the weight of the Nacelle Rotor Assembly, as well as the increase of the wind forces and pitching moment. Moreover, the larger the turbines and platforms the larger surge/sway and yaw unbalanced forces, which will need to be hold up by the mooring system. The mooring system has to be designed to balance the wind and wave forces and provide the stiffness needed to the FOWT for a proper behavior. Moreover, the mooring system has to achieve enough reliability to prevent line failure that could lead to a chain reaction within a floating wind farm, and thus huge loses. Then, a complete and detailed fatigue analysis should be performed in order to guarantee the performance of the FOWT during its service life. Within the CoReWind EU-2020 project, the Windcrete platform is upscaled to withstand the new EIA 15MW reference wind turbine. As concrete is used as a main material, the mass and inertia are larger than steel counterpart which leads to stiffer and more loaded mooring system. In this paper, the fatigue analysis of the Windcrete mooring system is assessed and compared using different methods.