Supervisors: Antonio Pegalajar-Jurado, Freddy Johannes Madsen and Henrik Bredmose, all DTU Wind Energy
Examiner: Mark Laier Brodersen, Ørsted
Title: Validation of the QuLAF model against HAWC2 and scaled physical tank tests for a 10MW TetraSpar floating wind turbine.
In the present study, a validation of the Quick Load Analysis for Floating wind turbines (QuLAF)
against a time domain aeroelastic code (HAWC2) and experimental data was performed on the
TetraSpar floater developed by Stiesdal Offshore Technologies. The main motivation of this
was to further contribute to the building of the efficiency in floating wind turbine design and
advance the use of fast numerical models as part of the FloatStep project.
The process carried out in order to perform the verification and validation against HAWC2 and
the experimental data was:
• Setup of the QuLAF model. This implied finding all the parameters needed to run the
model and doing different simulations in HAWC2 in order to determine necessary external
and non-linear inputs (mooring stiffness calculation and aerodynamic loads and damping
coefficients).
• Running the verification with HAWC2 for four different wind and sea states: regular and
irregular waves, wind only and wind with regular and irregular waves, and below rated,
rated and above rated wind speeds.
• Running the validation by comparing the results obtained with the experimental data
acquired during the TetraSpar tank tests campaign.
At a later stage of the project, second order wave excitation forces were implemented in HAWC2
and QuLAF using the Newman approximation to better replicate experimental results, and an
alternative way to extract the aerodynamic damping coefficients of the turbine was investigated
in order to calculate them faster and easier.