Floating Offshore Wind Farm Design Optimization, Including Mooring Line Orientations and Fatigue Design: Paper No. V001T01A040

We present a method to place the turbines of a floating offshore wind farm and their mooring lines in the allocated area. It is based on the construction of a regular pattern for the turbines positions and mooring lines orientation and have two steps. It first places the turbines within the allocated area in order to maximize the annual energy production (AEP) with two different hypothesis conducting to different layouts. And in a second step, it optimizes the mooring lines positions. For this second step, we developed two algorithms, one maximizing the distance between mooring lines and the second minimizing the interaction between mooring lines orientations and wind, wave and current directions. Finally, we provide a conservative fatigue estimate on the mooring lines taking into account the impact of stationary wake deficit and added turbulence and the impact of the mooring lines orientation. For the example, we consider a farm composed of 67 IEA 15 MW wind turbines to be placed within a rectangular area of 256 km2. Each turbine is supported by a UMaine semi-submersible floater equipped with 3 semi-taut lines adapted for the Humboldt deep water site.