Investigation of turbines wakes and wake-rotor interaction in a floating offshore wind farm

Floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) rotors have complex aero-elastic dynamics due to atmospheric turbulence, interaction with front turbine wakes, and motion of the floating platform. This work investigates the dynamics of wake and wake-rotor interaction in a offshore wind farm, using a reduced order model based on the Actuator Line Model and a finite element model of the blade structure. The approach allows for high-resolution computational fluid dynamics simulations of the evolution and transport of rotor wakes, while reducing computational costs by using a simplified model of the blade. The analysis starts with a reference case of rigid and fixed-bottom turbines and then incorporates the rigid body motion of the floating platform and finally the elastic response of the blades. The fluid dynamics are computed using detached eddy simulation, and the simulation framework is based on open-source tools for computational fluid dynamics and Actuator Line Model, coupled with an in-house developed finite element method solver for fluid-structure interaction.