Defense Holdings (United States)

Abstract Mooring failures are critical scenarios to be investigated for the safe design of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs). Designers typically rely on both physical model tests and numerical simulations to predict the FOWT response to mooring line breakage. The Floating Wind industry needs increased confidence in the ability of numerical models to tackle these design challenges. This paper presents laboratory experiments on mooring failures for a FOWT foundation, along with the application of a numerical framework to simulate the foundation response. The framework couples a wave propagation model with a potential flow-based solver for the floating structure. Experimental and numerical results are presented and compared, identifying strength and areas of improvement for the applied numerical framework.