Treating Wind Measurements Influenced by Offshore Structures with CFD Methods

Large amount of wind data collected on offshore structures, such as platforms, masts and ships in the North Sea, often suffers from poor availability and poor quality. Thus it may not currently be used for validation of meteorological or wind energy applications and must be disregarded as influenced by the structures. Performing an analysis on microscale can serve for understanding and predicting inconsistencies between measured and model data. This study presents a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model of a typical offshore structure. Wind measurements influenced by the structure are compared with the corresponding numerical observations and demonstrate the usability of CFD for data validation and improvement of meteorological models.