The importance of fully-attached unsteady aerodynamics in floating wind turbine design

This paper examines the relative importance of terms arising from unsteady, fully-attached aerodynamics, when designing floating offshore wind turbines. Two different mathematical models were used to calculate and compare fully-attached unsteady aerodynamic loading with the quasi-steady counterpart. The first model was based on work by Theodorsen [6], the second on work by Van der Wall and Leishman [7]. The NREL 5MW reference offshore wind turbine [2] was used in both models.