Analysis of NREL-5MW Floating offshore wind turbine under different incoming turbulent characteristic
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Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) operate in highly unsteady marine environments where platform motions and atmospheric turbulence jointly influence wake behavior and downstream energy capture \cite{troldborg2011numerical, VERMEER2003467}. Understanding how these two effects interact is essential for improving wake modeling and evaluating multi-turbine performance at realistic offshore sites. This study investigates the combined impact of inflow turbulence integral length scale and platform surge motion on the wake dynamics of two aligned FOWTs separated by five rotor diameters. Large-eddy simulations were performed using an actuator line model (ALM) with a WALE--LES turbulence closure to examine how inflow coherence and surge motion reshape wake development and downstream flow conditions. Synthetic turbulent inflows were generated using the divergence-free synthetic eddy method (DFSEM), with inlet integral length scales ranging from $L_u/R = 0.25$ to $1.25$. In the absence of a rotor, Strouhal numbers were extracted from the hub-height velocity signal at the turbine location, showing a clear decrease in dominant frequency from $St = 0.71$ to $0.12$ as $L_u$ increased. When considering the two turbines, larger turbulence length scales introduce energetic low-frequency eddies that accelerate shear-layer destabilization behind the upstream rotor. This promotes earlier breakdown of the tip-vortex system (see Fig. ~\ref{fig:Q_all}), enhances lateral and vertical entrainment, and leads to substantially faster wake recovery. In contrast, uniform inflow preserves coherent helix tip-vortex over longer distances, resulting in a much slower transition to turbulence. As a consequence, the disk-averaged velocity within the inter-turbine region increases from $0.37\,U_\infty$ under uniform inflow to values exceeding $0.50\,U_\infty$ for the largest $L_u$, reducing the wake deficit by more than 15--20 percentage points. Periodic platform surge motion has a similar but secondary influence, with its effect largely governed by the upstream turbine’s response and only weakly dependent on whether the two platforms surge in-phase or in opposite phase.
