Abstract
In a wind farm with shared mooring, the floating wind turbines (FWTs) are physically coupled through mooring lines. Therefore, motion patterns and mooring line tensions differ from situations where classical (individual) mooring is used. Conventional model testing of such a farm requires physical modelling of all the connected FWTs, which raises practical limitations concerning scaling and cost. In cyber-physical testing, a physical model of a part of the shared mooring farm is coupled with a numerical model of the remaining part of the farm. This paper describes the methodology and results of a cyber-physical test campaign conducted at the basin of NTNU/SINTEF Ocean, Trondheim, on 2- and 9-FWT shared farms. Static excursion tests were conducted to verify the coupling between the physical and numerical FWTs in the cyber-physical tests. Decay tests were performed in which the exact coupled modes of the shared farm were excited. The performance of the farm in irregular waves without wind or current loads was assessed along with mooring line breakage tests. Technical challenges encountered during testing are discussed, and comparisons of experimental results against the closest approximate numerical simulations are presented.