Recently, several countries have started to plan offshore floating wind farms. Although they are considered to be more difficult to design, wind farms in deeper waters are, in general, less sensitive to space availability, noise restriction, visual pollution, and regulatory problems. Furthermore, in designing these floating wind farms, the existing technology and experience of offshore industry used for petroleum production has been helpful. In this regard, if technology and infrastructure is fully developed, offshore floating wind farms are expected to produce huge amounts of clean electricity at competitive prices compared to other energy sources.
Another concept for floating offshore wind farms is the Multiple Unit Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (MUFOWT). This model includes multiple turbines upon a single floating platform rather than the typical concept of the floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) where each turbine has its own floating platform. The possible advantages and disadvantages of MUFOWT over single floating turbine were checked, and an effort was made to develop analytical tools for evaluating the performance of multiple turbine wind farm was made.
FAST, which is design code which has been developed for years in the U.S. wind energy industry, is implemented into the floater-mooring coupled dynamic analysis program, CHARM3D, and vice versa so that the tower-floater coupling can be accurately achieved. By combining FAST and CHARM3D, the wind turbine design code FAST can include a more efficient hydrodynamic module and finite element dynamic mooring line module at the same time. To achieve the objectives of this study, the combined design code FAST-CHARM3D is extended in order to accommodate multiple turbines on a single floating platform. Of course, multiple turbine dynamics should be solved simultaneously with the time marching scheme as done by single turbine analysis. In past years, this coupled program for multi units floating offshore wind turbine (MUFOWT) has been persistently developed and examined by the several experimental data. This program has been tested and the results have shown the physical phenomenon well.