Design Basis for the Feasibility Evaluation of Four Different Floater Designs

Floating wind turbines are gaining focus as the technology is advancing and more and more demonstration projects are being deployed. The key aspects for this development are maturing the technology towards cost effective solutions for commercialization. In this context, the European Union funding for the research project LIFEs50+ as part of Horizon2020 framework becomes more and more relevant for the development / commercialization of floating wind turbines / wind farm. To obtain cost effective designs, it is important to characterize the correct site environmental conditions such as wind, waves, current, etc.. Based on these site conditions, appropriate design concepts are chosen. Once a specific design concept is chosen, relevant design methodologies as per the existing standards shall be agreed upon as there are several parties such as met-ocean experts, foundation designer, wind turbine supplier, certification agencies, etc., are involved. As the design methodologies are clearly defined, all the experts can initiate the design process in parallel. In general, the above mentioned process (the environmental conditions and design methodology including the design load case table) is documented, which is termed as Design Basis. In this paper, the focus is given to the development of a generalized design basis, which categorizes three different sites along with design methodologies for the design concepts along with the process followed for the development of the generic design basis. By this way, different interested parties can make use of the design basis to fill in the relevant data and to understand how these data would influence the global design.