Structural Control of Floating Wind Turbine using Tuned Mass Damper (TMD)

Floating offshore wind turbines will be one of the next frontiers to be developed for clean energy generation in the coming decades. And the key to its competitiveness is to reduce costs and, to achieve this, it is necessary to incorporate control strategies to improve the efficiency of the system.

The main objective of this present work is to obtain the optimal mass, stiffness and damping characteristics of a TMD (Tuned Mass Damper) applied to a floating wind turbine. It improves the power production and structural and hydrodynamic behavior of the floating wind turbine. The simulations are performed using a semi-submersible platform considering the environmental characteristics of the offshore region of the coast of Maranhão, in Brazil.

Simulations of the dynamic behavior of the wind turbine equipped with TMD are carried out in the time domain using the open source software OpenFAST, developed by the United States National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The OpenFAST results are used in Minitab software in an optimization process using the Design of Experiments (DOE) method, which is based on statistical analysis. As the main conclusion, TMDs at the base of the floating platform tower have great potential to reduce the pitch moment in the structure. This case had a decrease of up to 9.29% in the maximum pitch moment suffered by the base tower in the simulations. Meanwhile, TMDs in the nacelle have more potential to reduce the range of pitch motion.