Passive vibration control of an offshore floating hydrostatic wind turbine model

We propose to make use of the hydraulic reservoir of a floating barge hydrostatic wind turbine (HWT) to suppress the pitch and roll motions of the barge by making the reservoir into a shape of an annular rectangular to serve as a bidirectional tuned liquid column damper (BTLCD). This means that we have made a barge‐motion damper with negligible extra costs as an HWT needs a reservoir for fluid storage anyway. The barge HWT simulation model is transformed from the NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) 5‐MW geared equipped ITI Energy barge wind turbine model within the FAST (fatigue, aerodynamics, structures, and turbulence) code by replacing its drivetrain with a hydrostatic transmission drivetrain and incorporating the coupled dynamics of the barge‐reservoir system. We use 2 simplified turbine‐reservoir models to optimize the parameters of the BTLCD reservoir, which describe the pitch and roll motions of the turbine‐reservoir system, respectively. Simulation results based on the transformed NREL 5‐MW barge HWT model show that the optimal BTLCD reservoir is very effective in mitigating pitch and roll motions of the barge under realistic wind and wave excitations, which reduces the tower load and improves the power quality.