With the environmental challenges and changes in the climate the world now is facing, the focus on finding new sustainable energy sources have increased, and in 2015 Norway presented the 2030 Agenda. This agenda presents 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) decided by all UN member states as a universal guideline for national and international actions, emphasizing a holistic approach to achieving sustainable development for all. The government of Norway places great importance in accomplishing these goals, one of which is a focus on sustainable energy.Offshore wind energy has become increasingly popular in recent years. One reason is the resistance to land-based wind turbines, due to their impact on nature while being constructed and operated. Research states that offshore wind energy has the potential to sustain the entire world’s energy consumption 18 times over. With its long coastline and experience in offshore installations, Norway has great opportunities to invest and develop offshore energy.There are many benefits and challenges when building wind turbines offshore, as opposed to on land. Offshore, a wind turbine is subject to much harsher elements than on land; stronger winds as well as waves. Off the Norwegian coast, the ocean is mostly too deep to have a fixed foundation. One solution is to have floating wind turbines, moored by chains or wires. However, the motion of the waves and the force of the wind will affect the floating wind turbine.It is still desirable to build sustainable and long lasting offshore wind turbines due to several benefits; bottom piled wind turbines cannot easily be built at depths greater than around 60 meters, making the Norwegian coast mostly unviable, as their construction greatly impacts and damages marine life,&nbsp;and the size of the floating wind turbine is less limited by the supporting structures’ capabilities.The goal of this paper is to explore the possibility of using gyroscopes placed inside floating turbines as a stabilizing tool. The idea is that rotating disks/flywheels placed inside the tower of the turbine can stabilize the wind turbine, reduce strain on moorings, as well as store excess power captured from the motion of the waves.Similar projects have been done at WUSAP in cooperation with Professor Thomas J. Impelluso. Two such papers are “Dual Gyroscope Wave Energy Converter” and “Modeling Crane Induced Ship Motion Using the Moving Frame Method” . This research is lightly based on work done in these papers.The project implements the Moving Frame Method (MFM) in dynamics to model the motion of the floating turbine and the forces acting on it with and without the gyroscopes. The MFM leverages Lie Group Theory, Cartan’s moving frames and a new notation from the principle of geometrical physics. This makes it possible to extract the equations of motion. The method solves the equations numerically using a relatively simple numerical integration scheme. Then, the Cayley-Hamilton theorem and Rodriguez’s formula reconstructs the rotation matrix for the floating wind turbine and completes the analysis.Furthermore, an online web page is created where the research results are presented qualitatively as a 3D simulation. This is done by using WebGL, Javascript and HTML. By displaying the motions in 3D one can more intuitively see and understand the effects the disks have on the structure, as one will be comparing to visual instances along with the data, instead of only the data.

Energy Storage and Stabilization of Floating Wind Turbines

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

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