Structural control for a barge-type floating offshore wind turbine with a skyhook inerter configuration

This paper studies the wind and wave-induced structural load mitigation problem for a floating offshore wind turbine with a barge platform, where a tuned mass damper (TMD) with a skyhook inerter configuration is employed. The skyhook inerter is intended to virtually increase the mass of the TMD, which will be demonstrated that the structural loads can be effectively reduced by increasing the mass of the TMD. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the application of a skyhook inerter system can reduce the load of a barge-type floating offshore wind turbine to some extent. Semi-active inerters are adopted to realize the skyhook inerter configuration, where two control laws, that is the on-off control and the continuous control, are applied for the semi-active inerter to approximate the skyhook inerter. However, the improvement of overall performance is not significant in numerical simulations, indicating that although the ideal skyhook inerter can effectively improve the performance for the floating offshore wind turbine, its semi-active realizations by using semi-active inerter in associated with the on-off control and the continuous control have very limited performance improvement.