Simplified modeling of floating offshore wind farms with shared mooring line configurations

Rising capital expenses for floating wind farms are pushing back their deployments in deep seas. Shared moorings can provide more cost-effective solutions than conventional moorings by reducing material and installation costs. However, current tools are not practical for intensive dynamic simulations of floating wind farms with shared mooring designs, due to their high computational demands. To address this challenge, this paper presents a simplified modeling approach that integrates a low-order multi-body simulation module, a quasi-static mooring model, and a Gaussian-based wake model. The efficiency and prediction accuracy of this approach are verified against a higher-fidelity simulation tool, showing significant reductions in computational effort and strong agreement in predictions for power output, floater surge, and mooring force of a two-turbine floating array under various environmental conditions. This approach is further applied for fast analysis and evaluation of an improved shared mooring design. The findings demonstrate that this method can facilitate design, analysis and evaluation process for shared mooring configurations during the conceptual design phase, advancing the development of more cost-effective solutions for floating wind farms.