Master/Project thesis: Simulations of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWT)

Figure: Kleusberg et al. 2017

Background: with the need of decarbonisationing the energy sector, exploiting new sources of renewable energy is of paramount importance. FOWT represents a promising technology in the recent future, allowing to exploit wind sources in offshore deep sea environments, thanks to a floating platform and a mooring system. However, the platform motion due to sea waves and unsteady aerodynamics represent a new challenge with respect to the fixed wind turbine technology.

Therefore, in order to fill the gaps present in the literature we are developing a project focusing on Reynolds-averaged-Navier-Stokes simulation (RANS) and large-eddy-simulation (LES), with a special focus on the analysis of wake characteristics in order to allow a better design of wind farms. The main software that will be used is openFOAM, but implementations on the spectral-element, GPU solver neko (Jansson et al. 2024)are also planned. In this context, different projects could be discussed, depending on the interest and background (computer science, engineering, physics, …) of the student:

hydrodynamic (wake-platform interactions) analysis;
wake aerodynamics change w.r.t platform motion;
benchmarking of different models (actuator line models, RANS turbulence models);
linear stability analysis of the wake / development of reduced-order models to predict the wake behaviour (mostly suitable for maths / physics students).

Specific tasks: