Optimal Micro-Siting of Weathervaning Floating Wind Turbines

This paper presents a novel tool for optimizing floating offshore wind farms based on weathervaning turbines. This solution is grounded on the ability of the assembly (wind turbine plus floater) to self-orientate into the wind direction, as this concept is allowed to freely pivot on a single point....

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEnergies (Basel) Vol. 14; no. 4; p. 886
Main Authors Serrano González, Javier, Burgos Payán, Manuel, Riquelme Santos, Jesús Manuel, González Rodríguez, Ángel Gaspar
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.02.2021
Subjects
Economic models
Electricity
floating offshore
Genetic algorithms
Geographical coordinates
Infrastructure
micro-siting
Offshore
Offshore energy sources
Offshore operations
offshore wind farm
optimal layout
Optimization algorithms
passive yaw control
Turbines
Wind direction
Wind farms
Wind power
Yaw
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Summary:This paper presents a novel tool for optimizing floating offshore wind farms based on weathervaning turbines. This solution is grounded on the ability of the assembly (wind turbine plus floater) to self-orientate into the wind direction, as this concept is allowed to freely pivot on a single point. This is a passive yaw potential solution for floating wind farms currently in the demonstration phase. A genetic algorithm is proposed for optimizing the levelised cost of energy by determining the geographical coordinates of the pivot points (i.e., the position over which the assembly can rotate to self-orient to the incoming wind direction). A tailored evaluation module is proposed to take into account the weathervaning motion around the pivot point depending on the incoming wind direction. The results obtained show the suitability of the proposed method to solve the addressed problem under realistic conditions. Additionally, the influence of the feasible region defined by the plot and the maximum area occupied on floating offshore wind farm design are also analysed in the proposed test cases. These deployable area constraints are of great importance for the viability of this technology, as it requires more space than classical solutions anchored to a fixed point.
ISSN:1996-1073
1996-1073
DOI:10.3390/en14040886