Floating Spar-Type Offshore Wind Turbine Hydrodynamic Response Characterisation: a Computational Cost Aware Approach

The hydromechanics analysis of floating offshore wind turbines is a fundamental and time consuming part of the design process, traditionally analysed with methods of computational fluid dynamics. In this work, an alternative computational framework is suggested, able to significantly accelerate the design process with minimal accuracy loss. Through the use of a state-of-the-art potential-flow code, a surrogate model is developed with the aim to approximate the Response Amplitude Operators of any arbitrary floating offshore wind turbine of the spar buoy type. The results, measured in terms of accuracy and computational effort, demonstrate that this approach is able to approximate the potential-flow solver with very high accuracy at a fraction of the computational cost.