Dynamic Response of Monopile Wind Turbine in Large Waves

Abstract

A strongly coupled hydroelastic code based on OpenFOAM has been applied to evaluate dynamic responses of a bottom mounted monopile in regular waves at 3 different wave periods and 3 wave steepness. The code uses a free surface RANSE solver to determine accurately the hydrodynamic loads and a modal superposition approach to describe the dynamic structural responses. Numerical simulations include both rigid and elastic monopiles and the results are evaluated against publicly available model test experiments. The discussion includes a quality control of the numerically simulated incident wave fields, mesh dependency and the quality of the numerically predicted and experimentally measured third harmonic of the inline forces.