Added mass and damping forces of a floating tidal turbine undergoing pendulum motion

Abstract

Many commercial engineering software programmes used to design floating tidal turbines neglect the added mass and damping because most of the code considers floating wind turbine designs, which is acceptable since air is significantly less dense than seawater. However, added mass and damping forces are important parameters that need to be included in the design of a floating tidal turbine. The increase in instantaneous time-dependent loading and changes in the natural frequency of a floating tidal turbine make these hydrodynamic forces non-negligible, especially for large turbines. The present study describes the construction of matrices of added mass and damping that can be used as inputs to simpler engineering models. These matrices were constructed by conducting three-dimensional blade-resolved CFD simulations for a floating tidal turbine operating under a prescribed pitch motion (i.e., pendulum-like motion) under various motion amplitudes and frequencies. The added mass and damping were also empirically extracted from the fluctuating thrust force, the empirical model derivation of which is given in this paper. Higher motion amplitude and frequency increase the pressure on rotor blades, which increases the amplitude of loading variations. A floating tidal turbine's mean power and thrust deviate from that of a stationary turbine due to suboptimal rotor operating conditions caused by the change in tip speed ratio (which is due to the apparent velocity variation). Formulations can be constructed (as functions of motion amplitude and frequency) to calculate added mass and damping forces based on the data of hydrodynamic forces provided in this paper, which can be applied to a conventional turbine design model. The added mass and damping forces increase the overall mass and damping of the floating rotor, respectively, which affects the motion and loading of the device.