Dynamic responses analysis of a 5 MW spar-type floating wind turbine under accidental ship-impact scenario

Ship impact against offshore floating wind turbine (OFWT) has been identified as one of the major hazards with the development of OFWTs. The dynamic responses of OFWTs under ship impact should be taken into consideration during the design phase. This paper addresses a study on the dynamic responses of an OFWT in ship collision scenarios. Firstly, a mathematical model for external mechanism of ship-OFWT collision scenario is developed. Secondly, this model is combined with an in-house programme, DARwind, which can be used to predict nonlinear dynamic responses of whole OFWT system in time-domain. With the newly combined analysis tool, simulation cases for different scenarios are conducted to investigate the nonlinear dynamic responses of OFWT system, including the cases of still water condition, wave-only condition and wind-wave condition. It is shown that in still water condition, the ship impact will more obviously change the responses of motions and mooring system, compared with those in wave and wave-wind conditions. In the wave-only condition, these motions responses of platform are suppressed by wave effect, but the tower vibration and tower top deformation are sensitive to ship collision. For the wave-wind combined condition, the motions increment in surge and pitch due to ship collision becomes smaller than that of wave-only condition, but yaw motion has a considerable variation compared with those of the other two conditions. Additionally, the blade tip deformation increment due to ship collision are analyzed and it is found that the edgewise tip deformation got more obvious increment than that of flapwise. To further asses the safety of OFWT, the acceleration at nacelle are analyzed because some equipment might be sensitive to acceleration. The analysis results indicate that even though the OFWT structure doesn't get critical damage by ship impact, the equipment inside may still fail to work due to the high value of acceleration induced by ship impact. The research outcomes can benefit the safety design of OFWT in the engineering practice.