University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Masters Theses Dissertations and Theses

April 2023

Wind-Wave Misalignment Effects on Multiline Anchor Systems for

Floating Offshore Wind Turbines
Doron T. Rose
University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Recommended Citation
Rose, Doron T., "Wind-Wave Misalignment Effects on Multiline Anchor Systems for Floating Offshore Wind
Turbines" (2023). Masters Theses. 1272.
https://doi.org/10.7275/32690440 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/masters_theses_2/1272

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WIND-WAVE MISALIGNMENT EFFECTS ON MULTILINE ANCHOR SYSTEMS FOR FLOATING
OFFSHORE WIND TURBINES

A Thesis Presented

by

DORON TOBIAS ROSE

Submitted to the Graduate School of the

University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

February 2023

Mechanical and Industrial Engineering

Wind Power Engineering
© Copyright by Doron Tobias Rose 2023

All Rights Reserved

 WIND-WAVE MISALIGNMENT EFFECTS ON MULTILINE ANCHOR SYSTEMS FOR FLOATING
OFFSHORE WIND TURBINES

A Thesis Presented

by

DORON TOBIAS ROSE

Approved as to style and content by:

____________________________________
Matthew A. Lackner, Chairperson

____________________________________
Sanjay R. Arwade, Member

____________________________________
Don J. DeGroot, Member

____________________________________
Krish T. Sharman, Member

____________________________________________
Stephen S. Nonnenmann, Graduate Program Director
Mechanical & Industrial Engineering Department
 DEDICATION

To my partner, who inspires me to achieve more than I ever thought I could.

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to the financial sponsors of this work: the National Offshore Wind Research & Development
Consortium, the U.S. National Science Foundation (1936942), and the UMass Wind Energy Center.
Thank you also to Dr. Jason Jonkman, Dr. Anthony Viselli, Dr. Spencer Hallowell, and Dr. Matt Hall for
their critical guidance on simulating the UMaine semisubmersible platform with a taut mooring system
in waves and currents.

I cannot thank enough my professors at the University of Massachusetts Amherst: Dr. Don DeGroot, Dr.
Krish Sharman, Dr. Jessica Boakye, Dr. James Manwell, and especially my research advisors, Dr. Matthew
Lackner and Dr. Sanjay Arwade. Their instruction, mentorship, patience, and trust have fostered my
growth as an engineer and have profoundly changed the course of my career.

I am so grateful to my close collaborators, Katherine Coughlan, Michael Davis, and Krishnaveni

Balakrishnan, and to all my friends from the UMass Wind Energy Center and the Mechanical and Civil
Engineering departments. I wish them the greatest of success.

Finally, I owe all the rest of my achievement in graduate school to my family; their love, emotional
support, steadying advice, sincere interest, and food are boundless sources of joy and motivation.

v
 ABSTRACT
WIND-WAVE MISALIGNMENT EFFECTS ON MULTILINE ANCHOR SYSTEMS FOR FLOATING
OFFSHORE WIND TURBINES

FEBRUARY 2023

DORON TOBIAS ROSE, B.S., YALE UNIVERSITY

M.S.M.E. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

Directed by: Professor Matthew Lackner

Multiline anchors are a novel way to reduce the cost of arrays of floating offshore wind turbines
(FOWTs), but their behavior is not yet fully understood. Through metocean characterization and
dynamic simulations, this thesis investigates the effects of wind-wave misalignment on multiline anchor
systems. Four coastal U.S. sites are characterized in order to develop IEC design load cases (DLCs) and
analyze real-world misaligned conditions. Stonewall Bank, Oregon showed the highest 500-year
extreme wave height, at 16.6 m, while Virginia Beach, Virginia showed the highest 500-year wind speed,
at 56.8 m/s. Misalignment probability distributions, at all sites, are found to converge towards zero
(aligned conditions) and become less variable as wind speed increases. This indicates that high
misalignment angles are unlikely at high wind speeds.

A simulation parameter study, spanning a range of wave directions, misalignment angles, and DLCs, is
run in OpenFAST to explore how misalignment affects multiline anchor loading. The simulated anchor is
connected to three IEA 15 MW FOWT models via a taut mooring system. The force on the multiline
anchor is calculated by summing the three tension vectors from the mooring lines. The mean direction
of this force is found to align closely with the wind; each mean is within 5.5° of the wind direction.
Higher misalignment angles cause increases to the amount of directional variation about this mean.

The magnitude of the multiline force is also examined. Mean force level is found to be nearly
unaffected by misalignment. However, maximum force decreases significantly as misalignment angle
increases, dropping as much as 23.3% in extreme conditions. This confirms current anchor design
practice, which treats aligned metocean conditions as the peak load an anchor experiences. Standard
deviation of multiline force also decreases with misalignment. The operational load case, DLC 1.6,
shows a slight trend towards this, but the extreme case, SLC, shows a more pronounced drop of 32.4%.
This suggests that anchor cyclic loading analyses could benefit from considering misalignment. Doing so
could lead to lower estimates of the cyclic loading amplitudes that anchor designs must withstand, thus
leading to smaller, cheaper anchors.

vi
 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................................. v
ABSTRACT..................................................................................................................................................... vi
LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................................................. ix
LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................................................ x
CHAPTERS
1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................................... 1
2 LITERATURE REVIEW .................................................................................................................................. 5
2.1. Multiline Anchor Systems ............................................................................................................. 5
2.2. Wind-Wave Misalignment ............................................................................................................ 6
3 METOCEAN CHARACTERIZATION ............................................................................................................... 8
3.1. Overview ....................................................................................................................................... 8
3.1.1. IEA 15 MW Reference Wind Turbine .................................................................................... 8
3.1.2. IEC Design Load Cases ........................................................................................................... 9
3.1.3. Wind Shear Power Law ......................................................................................................... 9
3.2. Metocean Data Selection ............................................................................................................ 10
3.3. Data Import ................................................................................................................................. 13
3.4. Wind and Wave Extreme Value Analysis .................................................................................... 16
3.4.1. Conditional Extreme Waves ................................................................................................ 20
3.5. Misalignment Calculation ........................................................................................................... 22
3.6. Misalignment Distributions......................................................................................................... 25
3.7. Misalignment Variation by Wind Speed ..................................................................................... 28
4 MISALIGNMENT PARAMETER STUDY....................................................................................................... 35
4.1. Overview ..................................................................................................................................... 35
4.1.1. Directional Cases ................................................................................................................. 35
4.1.2. Design Load Cases ............................................................................................................... 36
4.2. Simulation Setup ......................................................................................................................... 38
4.2.1. OpenFAST Inputs ................................................................................................................. 39
4.2.2. Taut Mooring System Design .............................................................................................. 42
4.2.3. Mooring System Verification .............................................................................................. 45
4.3. Multiline Anchor Force Calculation............................................................................................. 47
4.4. Wind and Waves Directional Effects ........................................................................................... 49

vii
 4.4.1. Zero-Tension Events............................................................................................................ 54
4.5. Multiline Force Direction Distributions....................................................................................... 56
4.6. Multiline Anchor Loading Statistics ............................................................................................ 59
4.6.1. Mean Loads ......................................................................................................................... 60
4.6.2. Maximum Loads .................................................................................................................. 62
4.6.3. Multiline Anchor Load Reduction ....................................................................................... 65
4.6.4. Standard Deviation of Loads ............................................................................................... 65
5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK ........................................................................................................ 70
APPENDICES
A TAUT MOORING SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS .............................................................................................. 73
B COMPLETE ANCHOR LOAD STATISTICS .................................................................................................... 75
REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................................ 85

viii
 LIST OF TABLES
Table Page
1: Selected IEC design load cases [25]. SLC is the survival load case. .......................................................... 9
2: Properties of potential buoy datasets [28]. History length is the number of years during which each
buoy reported data. Green rows are the four chosen buoys. ................................................................... 11
3: Metocean quantities from NDBC buoys [30] .......................................................................................... 13
4: Sizes of buoy datasets, including measurement frequency as percentages of total timestamps ......... 14
5: Numbers of valid annual maximum values of winds and waves used in extreme value analysis .......... 16
6: Extreme metocean conditions for all buoy sites. Red entries are the greatest magnitudes of each
category. Wind speeds are converted to hub height. ................................................................................ 20
7: Extreme metocean conditions, including conditional extreme waves, for all buoy sites. Red entries are
once again the greatest magnitude of each category. Wind speeds are converted to hub height. ......... 22
8: Sizes of directional datasets.................................................................................................................... 24
9: Matrix of directional cases. Wave direction and misalignment angle determine the italicized wind
direction for each case, and the number of realizations appears below the wind direction. .................... 36
10: DLC conditions for Nantucket. Wind speeds are reported at IEA 15 MW turbine hub height. Currents
are wind-generated, near-surface. ............................................................................................................. 37
11: Turbulent wind field settings and parameters in TurbSim and InflowWind ........................................ 39
12: Turbine operational settings in ElastoDyn and ServoDyn. Upper rows, operating, for DLC 1.6. Lower
rows, parked, for DLC 6.1 and SLC. ............................................................................................................. 40
13: Waves, currents, and hydrodynamic properties in HydroDyn ............................................................. 41
14: Mooring line segments properties. Rope properties are for unstretched rope. Chain diameter refers
to wire diameter [38] [39]. ......................................................................................................................... 43
15: Standard deviation of multiline anchor force direction for all directional cases of DLC 1.6 and SLC.
Darker shaded cells indicate higher values. Standard deviations for each case are averaged over the six
realizations .................................................................................................................................................. 59

ix
 LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1: New offshore wind installations per year. CAGR is compound annual growth rate. Image from GWEC
[2]. ................................................................................................................................................................. 2
2: Breakdown by component of electricity cost for a reference floating wind project. Image from NREL
[7]. ................................................................................................................................................................. 3
3: Possible arrangements of FOWT arrays with shared, multiline anchors (B, C) and with single-line
anchors (A). Image from Fontana et al. [10]. ............................................................................................... 4
4: BOEM offshore wind energy planning areas [29] with arrows to show locations of four chosen buoys.
.................................................................................................................................................................... 12
5: Nantucket buoy wind and wave time histories. Both wind and waves vary seasonally. ...................... 15
6: Annual maxima histograms with fitted distributions ............................................................................. 17
7: Extreme value distributions for all four buoys, winds and waves .......................................................... 18
8: Diagram of extreme event calculation. Horizontal axis is wind speed or wave height for this analysis.19
9: Nantucket conditional extreme wave height distributions, conditioned on 10.6 m/s wind speed ....... 21
10: Directional time histories from the Stonewall, OR buoy ...................................................................... 25
11: Nantucket polar histograms of directional datasets ............................................................................ 26
12: Virginia Beach polar histograms of directional datasets ...................................................................... 26
13: Stonewall polar histograms of directional datasets ............................................................................. 27
14: Santa Maria polar histograms of directional datasets .......................................................................... 27
15: Binned misalignment distributions for Nantucket station ................................................................... 30
16: Binned misalignment distributions for Virginia Beach station ............................................................. 31
17: Binned misalignment distributions for Stonewall station .................................................................... 32
18: Binned misalignment distributions for Santa Maria station ................................................................. 33
19: Arrangement of a multiline anchor connected to three FOWTs. Lengths are not to scale. Block
arrows show the range of possible wave directions. Dashed lines show the coordinate system............. 36
20: Taut mooring line geometry. The line lengths, taut angle, water depth, and overall turbine height
are to scale. The anchor, floating platform and turbine proportions are not. The polyester rope is
shown at its pretensioned length. .............................................................................................................. 44
21: Mooring line tensions from upper bound verification test. Wind, waves, and current have 0°
heading. ...................................................................................................................................................... 46
22: Platform offsets from lower bound verification test. Wind, waves, and current have 0° heading...... 47
23: Mooring line tension time histories in aligned metocean conditions for all three load cases. Part (a)
is DLC 1.6, (b) DLC 6.1, and (c) SLC. WWC direction refers to wind, waves, and current. ......................... 51
24: Mooring line tensions time histories with 0° wind direction and varying wave directions. Part (a) is
DLC 1.6, (b) DLC 6.1, and (c) SLC. ................................................................................................................ 53
25: Detail of zero-tension events in Line 1 in SLC 60° aligned directional case. Green boxes show the
zones of magnification for zoom 1 and 2.................................................................................................... 55
26: Polar histograms of multiline force direction in the xy-plane for all directional cases of (a) DLC 1.6
and (b) SLC. Bins are 10° wide and normalized to probability. Green and blue arrows show wind and
wave directions. Each row of plots represents one wave direction, and each column one misalignment
angle. ........................................................................................................................................................... 58

x
27: Mean mooring line tensions from all DLC 6.1 simulations. The means from the six realizations for
each data point are almost identical to each other, so the markers are overlaid. .................................... 61
28: Mean multiline forces from all DLC 6.1 realizations. ............................................................................ 62
29: Maximum line tensions for SLC. ........................................................................................................... 63
30: Maximum multiline force for SLC. ........................................................................................................ 63
31: Standard deviation of line tensions for DLC 1.6. .................................................................................. 66
32: Standard deviation of line tensions for SLC. ......................................................................................... 67
33: Standard deviation of multiline force for DLC 1.6. ............................................................................... 69
34: Standard deviation of multiline force for SLC. ...................................................................................... 69
35: Mean line tensions for DLC 1.6. ............................................................................................................ 76
36: Mean multiline force for DLC 1.6. ......................................................................................................... 76
37: Maximum line tensions for DLC 1.6. ..................................................................................................... 77
38: Maximum multiline force for DLC 1.6. .................................................................................................. 77
39: Duplicate of Figure 31. Standard deviation of line tensions for DLC 1.6. ............................................. 78
40: Duplicate of Figure 33. Standard deviation of multiline force for DLC 1.6........................................... 78
41: Duplicate of Figure 27. Mean line tensions for DLC 6.1. ...................................................................... 79
42: Duplicate of Figure 28. Mean multiline force for DLC 6.1. ................................................................... 79
43: Maximum line tensions for DLC 6.1. ..................................................................................................... 80
44: Maximum multiline force for DLC 6.1. .................................................................................................. 80
45: Standard deviation of line tensions for DLC 6.1. .................................................................................. 81
46: Standard deviation of multiline force for DLC 6.1. ............................................................................... 81
47: Mean line tensions for SLC. .................................................................................................................. 82
48: Mean multiline force for SLC. ............................................................................................................... 82
49: Duplicate of Figure 29. Maximum line tensions for SLC. ...................................................................... 83
50: Duplicate of Figure 30. Maximum multiline force for SLC. ................................................................... 83
51: Duplicate of Figure 32. Standard deviation of line tensions for SLC. ................................................... 84
52: Duplicate of Figure 34. Standard deviation of multiline force for SLC. ................................................ 84

xi
 1
INTRODUCTION

Across the world, governments and renewable energy developers are collaborating to plan and

construct tens of gigawatts of offshore wind energy projects in the coming decades [1]. Most of these

will use fixed-bottom turbines, which are support structures fixed to the seabed, such as monopiles [2].

However, with the need for energy production from offshore wind growing rapidly and the availability of

shallow-water development sites shrinking, floating offshore wind energy is receiving increased

attention and investment from industry and academia. Just in October, 2021, the 50 MW Kincardine

floating offshore wind farm in Scotland began operation, becoming the world’s largest floating wind

farm [3], and it may cede that title after only a short reign, as Equinor plans to complete construction of

the 88 MW Hywind Tampen project off of Norway in 2023 [4].

The key advantage of floating wind is its flexibility to generate power in deep waters. Floating wind is

the most economical option for offshore wind in waters deeper than 60 meters, where it becomes

challenging to build fixed-bottom structures [5]. The deep-water siting for floating wind offers

numerous potential benefits.

• It allows projects to be built near coastal populations and electricity demand centers that had

been unable to develop offshore wind resources because of their water depth. This includes the

U.S. Pacific Coast and Hawaii, Japan, South Korea, and others [5].

• It allows access to some of the best wind resources that exist over deeper water. The Hywind

Scotland floating wind farm, for example, in its several years of operation, has shown

exceptionally consistent power generation, with the highest capacity factor of any wind farm

on- or offshore of the United Kingdom [6].

1
 • It also allows projects to be sited further from the coastline where they can have less impact on

coastal aesthetics and where there is less demand from other stakeholders, like fishing, boating,

and military.

Despite these well-understood benefits, floating wind has yet to be implemented at the commercial

scale of fixed-bottom wind. With the commissioning of the Kincardine project in late 2021, the

cumulative installed generation capacity of floating wind worldwide increased to just 123 MW, while

offshore wind overall has grown by thousands of installed megawatts each year for the last decade, as

shown in Figure 1 [2].

Figure 1: New offshore wind installations per year. CAGR is compound annual growth rate. Image from GWEC [2].

Floating wind’s slow implementation is due to fundamental technical and logistical challenges that

dramatically increase costs. In their report “2020 Cost of Wind Energy Review,” Stehly and Duffy from

the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) modeled a hypothetical floating wind project off the

U.S. Pacific coast and estimated its electricity to cost $129 per megawatt-hour—much higher than the

$77 per MWh that they estimated for a fixed-bottom project in shallower U.S. Northeast waters [7].

While this comparison between different locations is not fully equivalent, both locations would be

2
attractive development areas because of the wind resource and electricity demand. However, the

substantial cost increase for floating wind hinders development at the Pacific coast location. In the

current U.S. offshore wind market, the Northeast coastline has numerous projects under active

construction or development, such as Vineyard Wind, while the Pacific coast has seen only early-stage

development [8].

One component of the floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) that can be optimized to decrease costs is

the turbine’s mooring system. According to Stehly and Duffy’s analysis, the FOWT substructure and

foundation, including mooring, account for 27.1% of the project’s overall cost of electricity, as shown in

Figure 2. Thus, these components are some of the largest cost contributors [7] but also present

significant opportunities for cost reduction.

Figure 2: Breakdown by component of electricity cost for a reference floating wind project. Image from NREL [7].

Currently installed FOWT projects have each turbine connected to several anchors for station keeping.

Fontana et al. described in 2016 a concept in which FOWTs share these anchors between them, referred

to as multiline anchors, thus reducing the total number of anchors needed for the array, as seen in

Figure 3 [9]. Using fewer anchors in a project could decrease costs in anchor manufacturing, anchor

installation, and in seafloor geotechnical surveys prior to construction.

3
Figure 3: Possible arrangements of FOWT arrays with shared, multiline anchors (B, C) and with single-line anchors
(A). Image from Fontana et al. [10].

Designing robust and technically efficient multiline anchor systems requires knowledge of the forces

that the FOWTs transfer to the anchors. These forces and motions depend strongly on the

meteorological and oceanographic, or metocean, conditions, particularly the wind, waves, and current.

Therefore, characterizing metocean conditions and their subsequent impacts on FOWT dynamics is vital

to developing multiline anchor technology.

One aspect of offshore environmental conditions that has not been modeled or analyzed for multiline

anchors is wind-wave misalignment, which is when the wind and waves approach from two different

directional headings. While this situation is known to occur often [11], the effects of misalignment on

multiline FOWT anchors are not well-understood. This thesis aims to examine those effects by

determining and modeling several design load cases of FOWTs with multiline anchors under misaligned

conditions. This thesis will also suggest how misalignment can be included in future multiline anchor

analyses for FOWT arrays.

This thesis is organized as follows: Chapter 2 reviews existing literature on multiline anchors and wind-

wave misalignment; Chapter 3 presents a metocean characterization study of four coastal sites, focusing

on extreme conditions and misalignment; Chapter 4 details a simulation parameter study that analyzes a

multiline anchor in a range of misaligned conditions; and Chapter 5 discusses the conclusions of these

studies and directions for future work.

4
 2
LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1. Multiline Anchor Systems

The high cost of mooring and anchoring systems for FOWTs is one of the challenges on the path towards

fully industrialized floating wind development. Because of this, researchers such as Fontana et al.,

mentioned in Chapter 1, have turned in recent years towards multiline anchor systems—where multiple

FOWTs connect to each individual anchor—as a way to decrease the total number of anchors used in a

floating wind plant. This could decrease material and manufacturing costs, geotechnical survey costs,

and installation costs for the floating wind project. At the OCEANS conference in 2016, Diaz et al. laid

out many of the necessary design considerations for multiline anchor systems, such as anchor number,

FOWT arrangement, anchor type, and soil conditions [12]. However, designing efficient multiline

systems also requires in-depth knowledge of the loads on the anchors due to environmental conditions.

Literature on this topic has analyzed many aspects of this loading but has always considered

environmental conditions with aligned wind and wave directions. In their 2018 paper, which built on

their initial results presented in 2016 [9], Fontana et al. studied multiline anchor loading in an array of

NREL 5 MW reference wind turbines on OC4 semisubmersible platforms. While they reached essential

conclusions about the directionality of the anchor loads, they only simulated various orientations of

aligned wind, wave, and current (WWC) [10]. Hallowell et al. in 2018 used a similar setup—NREL 5 MW

semisubmersible FOWTs experiencing only aligned WWC—in order to test the reliability of arrays of

multiline anchors. The authors suggested that any misalignment would increase the system’s apparent

reliability and so did not include it [13]. Balakrishnan et al. later compared Fontana’s simulations to

analogous simulations of the OC3 Hywind spar, similarly using aligned WWC conditions [14].

5
Design analyses of novel anchor and mooring systems have also focused on aligned metocean

conditions. In 2019, Lee and Aubeny introduced a concept for an anchor system, the multiline ring

anchor (MRA), designed specifically for FOWT arrays [15]. In their subsequent paper analyzing this

system, “Uplift Resistance of a Multiline Ring Anchor System in Soft Clay to Extreme Conditions,” they

used the NREL 5 MW semisubmersible model and the DTU 10 MW FOWT model under extreme

environmental conditions to determine loads that could be exerted on the MRA system. However,

based on the prior results from Fontana et al., they chose a single direction of aligned WWC to simulate

these conditions [16]. Another novel concept comes from van der Giessen in his 2021 thesis on

optimizing the mooring lines of an interconnected array of FOWTs. He used a larger FOWT model in his

analysis, the INO WINDMOOR 12 MW semisubmersible, and developed design load cases from

metocean data from Maine. He acknowledged that the data showed wind-wave misalignment but

simulated only aligned conditions [17].

Over the last several years of research, knowledge about the loading responses of multiline anchors for

FOWTs has expanded, but how the anchors’ respond to misaligned wind and waves has yet to be

investigated.

2.2. Wind-Wave Misalignment

Similar to the anchor studies, load analyses of the FOWT itself predominantly consider directionally

aligned wind and wave conditions. This concentrates the loading from both environmental forces, thus

providing conservative estimates of the loads that a FOWT would experience. However, exactly aligned

wind-wave conditions occur only rarely in the world [11], and the structural properties of offshore

turbines, fixed-bottom and floating, vary depending on the load direction. Structural damping in

particular varies between the fore-aft and side-side directions, relative to a turbine’s rotor [18].

Therefore, it remains important to examine a turbine’s response to offshore conditions where the wind

6
and wave are not exactly aligned or are significantly misaligned as this could give rise to unexpected

responses.

Several research teams have examined this possibility in the last decade and have focused on fatigue

effects and relatively small offshore turbines. In 2011, Fischer et al. studied the effects of wind-wave

misalignment on fatigue in the monopile and tower of fixed-bottom offshore turbines [11]. Barj et al.

also investigated fatigue effects but on spar-buoy floating turbines. This study measured extreme and

fatigue loads in the mooring lines and anchors, among other components [19]. Stewart and Lackner,

who previously contributed to the Barj et al. study, shifted their misalignment research to fixed-bottom

structures, looking at how tuned-mass dampers could decrease side-side fatigue damage to monopiles

[20]. Later, Bachynski et al. [21] and Karimirad and Michailides [22], in total, simulated five different

floating platform designs in misaligned conditions, looking at platform motions and loads. Karimirad

and Michailides, while studying their own novel semisubmersible design, found mooring line tensions

across a range of misalignments. Koukoura et al. took a different approach by validating their

simulations with operational measurements from a real-world turbine, but their aim was still to relate

misaligned conditions to tower structural fatigue [23]. Excepting Koukoura et al. who modeled a 3.6

MW commercial turbine, past misalignment studies have used the NREL 5 MW reference wind turbine.

Of these wind-wave misalignment studies, not all have investigated effects on floating systems and few

have considered the mooring and anchoring in depth. Barj et al. and Karimirad and Michailides both

found little dependence of the mooring on the misalignment, but by current offshore wind benchmarks,

the FOWT systems they studied may be out of date. The NREL 5 MW turbine is relatively small and the

single-line anchor systems may be less economical for floating wind at current commercial scale. For

these reasons, a misalignment study of cutting-edge FOWT systems with multiline anchors is warranted,

and using real-world, historical metocean data to determine the study’s load cases will help improve

understanding of how misalignment can be included in future studies.

7
 3
METOCEAN CHARACTERIZATION

3.1. Overview

Metocean conditions are the combination of meteorological and physical oceanographic conditions,

consisting of a variety of elements which can influence offshore structure design. Analyzing and

understanding these elements for a particular ocean site, through measurements, modeling, and

historical data, is known as metocean characterization, and it is a vital step in the offshore wind

development process. From this understanding developers can create and test design load cases that

represent the specific site of interest and tailor the wind turbine structures to withstand the oceanic

environmental loads. This analysis aims to characterize the metocean conditions, particularly wind

speeds, wave heights, and wind-wave misalignment, of four coastal sites on the United States Outer

Continental Shelf, so that their conditions can be modeled in misaligned design load cases for FOWTs

with multiline anchor systems.

3.1.1. IEA 15 MW Reference Wind Turbine

The analysis methods explained here are applicable to any offshore wind development project, but

when the analysis requires specific turbine parameters, the International Energy Agency (IEA) 15 MW

reference wind turbine model is used. This theoretical turbine model was published in 2020 by an

association of researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Technical University

of Denmark, and the University of Maine to be a reference and a cutting-edge benchmark for offshore

wind energy technology research. It has a rated wind speed of 10.6 m/s, a cut-out wind speed of 25

m/s, and a hub height of 150 m [24]. It is the turbine used in the FOWT anchor simulation study

explained in Chapter 4 of this thesis.

8
 3.1.2. IEC Design Load Cases

The three design load cases (DLCs) developed in this metocean analysis are adapted from those

specified in the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standard for offshore wind turbines, IEC

61400-3 [25]. They are explained in Table 1.

Table 1: Selected IEC design load cases [25]. SLC is the survival load case.
Load Case Situation Wind Speed Wave Condition Current Model
DLC 1.6 Operating turbine, Rated Conditional 50-year Normal Current Model
severe sea state
DLC 6.1 Parked turbine, 50-year 50-year Extreme Current Model,
extreme sea state 50-year
SLC Parked turbine, 500-year 500-year Extreme Current Model,
(DLC I.1) tropical cyclone 50-year

This analysis focuses on developing the wind speed and wave height conditions for these DLCs from

historical metocean measurements. The wind turbulence, wave period, and ocean current

requirements from the standard will be calculated based on models rather than the metocean data. For

DLC 1.6, instead of modeling the wind turbine’s entire operating wind speed range, as the IEC standard

specifies, this analysis focuses on the rated wind speed, which is the operating condition that generates

the greatest thrust on the turbine [26]. In addition, wind-wave misalignment will be included in DLC 1.6

even though it is not specified by the standard [25].

3.1.3. Wind Shear Power Law

In all IEC design load cases, the wind requirements refer to the wind speed at a turbine’s hub height, the

height of the center of the rotor [25]. This is a much higher elevation than the anemometer on a buoy

collecting wind speed data. Because of this elevation difference, the rotor would experience much

faster wind speeds than the buoy would measure, given the same metocean conditions. This is due to

the wind shear profile, the variation of wind speed with respect to elevation [26]. Therefore, to be

9
relevant to offshore turbine design requirements and modeling, raw wind speed data from a buoy must

be converted up to a turbine’s hub height.

This conversion is done with the wind shear power law,

𝛼
𝑧ℎ𝑢𝑏
𝑈ℎ𝑢𝑏 = 𝑈𝑏𝑢𝑜𝑦 ( )
𝑧𝑏𝑢𝑜𝑦
Eq. 1

which relates the desired wind speed at hub height, Uhub, to the raw wind speed at buoy-anemometer

height, Ubuoy, using the ratio of the two heights, zhub to zbuoy, and a characteristic exponent, α. The

exponent depends on the ocean conditions and can be determined empirically, or as in this analysis, it

can be estimated based on the metocean conditions of interest. Based on recommendations from DNV,

this analysis uses an α of 0.14 for normal conditions, DLC 1.6, and an α of 0.11 for extreme conditions,

DLC 6.1 and SLC [27]. The hub height is 150 m for the IEA 15 MW turbine [24], and the buoy-

anemometer heights are either 4.1 m or 3.2 m depending on the buoy site [28].

In this chapter, most wind measurements are presented at buoy height, unconverted, and any wind

speeds that are at hub height are specified as such. In Chapter 4 however, all wind speeds are presented

at hub height.

3.2. Metocean Data Selection

For this project, real-world metocean data histories were acquired from NOAA’s National Data Buoy

Center (NDBC), which provides extensive, quality-controlled data from its network of buoys across the

Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, Alaskan, and Hawaiian coasts [28]. The data histories of particular

interest are those documenting offshore wind development areas. These are coastal waters that BOEM,

the federal regulatory body that oversees the U.S. offshore wind industry, determines to have strong

potential for offshore wind energy development [29].

10
Specific data buoys near these areas were evaluated based on three general criteria:

• Relevance to U.S. offshore wind energy development areas

• Representation of various U.S. coastal climates and metocean characteristics

• Length of historical data records

Using Google Earth Pro and map files from BOEM and the NDBC, potential buoys were identified near

BOEM-designated offshore wind sites in the North and South of both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

Table 2 compares all buoys that were considered, including those that were not chosen. The final

selected ones are highlighted in green.

Table 2: Properties of potential buoy datasets [28]. History length is the number of years during which each buoy
reported data. Green rows are the four chosen buoys.

A specific dataset format had to be chosen because the NDBC archives each buoy’s data in a few

different forms. For all the candidate buoys, the “Standard meteorological” datasets cover the greatest

number of years, so those were optimal for analysis. Standard meteorological data is reported hourly

11
[30]. The NDBC website provides lists of the years during which each buoy took metocean data, making

it easy to compare data history lengths between the candidate buoys. The “History Length” column of

Table 2 shows the total number of years for each candidate buoy. Note that most of the buoys had gaps

of a year or two during their histories when they did not report anything at all.

Figure 4: BOEM offshore wind energy planning areas [29] with arrows to show locations of four chosen buoys.

Below are the four buoys chosen from this examination, and Figure 4 shows their approximate locations

relative to the BOEM offshore development areas.

• Station 44008, NANTUCKET 54 NM Southeast of Nantucket

• Station 44014, VIRGINIA BEACH 64 NM East of Virginia Beach, VA

• Station 46050, STONEWALL BANK - 20NM West of Newport, OR

• Station 46011, SANTA MARIA - 21NM NW of Point Arguello, CA

The Nantucket buoy is the closest NDBC station to the Vineyard Winds project and its neighboring lease

areas. The Virginia Beach buoy covers the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project. The

12
Stonewall Bank buoy is not immediately adjacent to an offshore wind development area, but it is nearby

another ocean renewable energy area, the PacWave North wave energy testing site [31]. The Santa

Maria buoy monitors the Diablo Canyon Call Area for California offshore wind development [29].

3.3. Data Import

These buoys’ data histories were downloaded from the NDBC website. Each history is a collection of

data files with one file for each year of data for each buoy [28]. In MATLAB, all these files/years were

imported, sanitized, and compiled into unified time-history arrays, one array for each buoy. These

arrays contained one column for each of the metocean quantities listed in Table 3. The buoys report

wind speed over an 8-minute averaging period rather than the 10-minute period required by the IEC

design standard. However, because shorter averaging periods result in higher estimates of extreme

wind speeds [25], this difference is assumed to have a negligible or conservative effect on the extreme

values estimated in this analysis.

Table 3: Metocean quantities from NDBC buoys [30]

Quantity Details
Wind speed Average over 8-minute sample
Wave height Significant wave height, average over 20-minute sample
Wind direction Average over 8-minute sampling period, direction that wind comes from, angle
taken clockwise from true North
Wave direction Average over 20-minute sample, direction that waves at the dominant period
come from, angle take clockwise from true North

The NDBC data files are mostly standardized and consistent, but occasional data formatting updates

over the decades complicated the data import process. Luckily, the NDBC mostly made these changes

across all buoys simultaneously, which allowed the import scripts to anticipate the data format based on

the year in question. The formatting changes that occurred in various years are listed below.

• Until the year 1999, the data buoys logged a 2-digit year, which had to be converted.

13
 • From 2000 onward, files gained a column for Tide measurements. However, the column only

began logging numerical values part of the way through that year, making the data array non-

rectangular for the year 2000.

• From 2005, files began including a column for minutes, which changed the column indexing.

• Starting at varying points in the 2000s, the headers of the data files increased by one line to list

units of measure.

While these formatting changes can be simply summarized here, it took a significant amount of trial,

error, and manual investigation to determine what they are and how to handle them. The NDBC data

files also log non-measurement entries as 99 or 99.00 or some variation, so these entries had to be

replaced with ‘not-a-number’ (NaN) values. All four buoys have measurement gaps in their histories of

at least a few months, but they still offer extensive datasets, as shown in Table 4.

Table 4: Sizes of buoy datasets, including measurement frequency as percentages of total timestamps
Buoy Site Data Total Data Sample Sizes per Measurement
History Time- Wind Wave Wind Wave
Length (yrs) stamps Speeds Heights Directions Directions
Nantucket, 38 355,868 326,011 273,820 323,945 86,171
MA 92% 77% 91% 24%
VA Beach, 31 280,119 249,694 229,482 246,819 221,990
VA 89% 82% 88% 79%
Stonewall, 30 382,486 359,346 226,023 359,182 136,454
OR 94% 59% 94% 36%
Santa Maria, 40 351,976 326,309 294,269 324,400 126,896
CA 93% 84% 92% 36%

The data timestamps column in Table 4 lists the total number of date-times logged by each buoy,

regardless of whether the buoy took data at that time. The sample sizes columns show only the

numbers of actual measurements taken by the buoys, excluding the NaN values. Those cells in the table

also contain data frequency percentages, which is the sample size as a percentage of the total number

of timestamps, to quantify how often the buoy took that measurement when it was operating. Note

14
though that all buoys also had periods of their histories when they logged neither timestamps nor

measurements, so even 100% would not mean full data coverage across the whole history. The data

history of the Nantucket buoy is plotted in Figure 5 as an example.

Figure 5: Nantucket buoy wind and wave time histories. Both wind and waves vary seasonally.

Note that the precision for these measurements has changed at times over the decades. This is why the

wind speed data is visibly stratified from 1985 to ’87; this buoy’s anemometer decreased in precision

during those years. Also note that at the beginning of 2019, the density of wind speed data points

becomes slightly higher than in the rest of the history. This is because at various times in the late 2010s,

NDBC buoys began logging wind speeds more frequently—at ten-minute intervals instead of hourly.

This is why all the buoys have significantly more data points for wind speeds than for wave heights, as

seen in Table 4, and why they logged even more timestamps than the total number of hours in their

years of operation.

While compiling the time histories, the import scripts also found the maximum values of wind speeds

and wave heights for each year of measurements by each buoy. These annual maxima were used in the

metocean extreme value analyses explained in Section 3.4. To ensure the scripts were finding the true

annual maxima for wind and waves each year—and not just the highest data point from an incomplete

15
record—a data coverage threshold was set at 50% of the year. In a certain year, if a buoy failed to

record a certain metocean quantity (either wind speed or wave height) for more than half of the hours

in that year, that buoy-year’s maximum for that quantity would be omitted from the lists of annual

maxima. This excluded a few years’ maxima, as shown in Table 5, and the rest were used in the

metocean extreme value analysis to determine design load cases representative of the buoy sites.

Table 5: Numbers of valid annual maximum values of winds and waves used in extreme value analysis
Buoy Site Data History Number of Valid Annual Maxima
Length (yrs) Wind Speed Wave Height
Nantucket, MA 38 32 35
VA Beach, VA 31 27 29
Stonewall, OR 30 27 28
Santa Maria, CA 40 36 38

3.4. Wind and Wave Extreme Value Analysis

Design standards for FOWTs evaluate a turbine’s performance in specific metocean conditions,

particularly wind speeds and wave heights of interest that are tailored to the ocean location where the

turbine will operate. To determine representative conditions for each buoy site, recommendations

were followed from DNV GL and BOEM’s report, “Metocean Characterization Recommended Practices

for U.S. Offshore Wind Energy.” The buoy’s lists of annual wind and wave maxima were treated as

random variables, sampled year over year, and the Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution was fit

to these maxima for use in extrapolating extreme events. This distribution is a generalized form of the

Weibull and Gumbel distributions, commonly used to model wind speeds. The CDF formula is

𝑥 − 𝜇 −1⁄𝜁
𝐹𝑋 (𝑥) = exp {− [1 + 𝜁 ( )] }, 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝜁 ≠ 0
𝜎
𝑥−𝜇
𝐹𝑋 (𝑥) = exp [− 𝑒𝑥𝑝 (− )] , 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝜁 = 0
𝜎
Eq. 2

where the three parameters, ζ, σ, and μ, are shape, scale, and location, respectively. The input variable,

x, is the metocean quantity being modeled, either wind speed or wave height [27]. The MATLAB

16
function gevfit calculates this distribution’s parameters by the maximum likelihood method for any

sample of maximum values of a random variable [32].

With the GEV parameters calculated, the probability density functions and cumulative distribution

functions (PDFs and CDFs, respectively) could be calculated for each buoy’s sets of wind and wave

annual maxima. Histograms and fitted GEV PDFs in Figure 6 show the distributions of annual maxima

for both winds and waves for each buoy.

Figure 6: Annual maxima histograms with fitted distributions

17
These plots confirm the fit of the GEV distributions and show the variation in annual maxima across

different buoy sites. Figure 7 directly compares the GEV distributions between the various sites.

On both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the more northern buoys, Nantucket, MA and Stonewall Bank,

OR, show peaks in their PDFs at higher wind and sea states than the southern buoys. However, for wind

speed, this does not necessarily correspond to higher extreme values because the spread of extreme

wind at Virginia Beach is wider than at Nantucket, leading to higher extreme wind speeds at the

southern site. See Table 6.

Figure 7: Extreme value distributions for all four buoys, winds and waves

With the GEV distributions calculated, the magnitudes of extreme events could be found. The return

periods, T, of the events were 50 and 500 years, selected based on the IEC design standard [25]. For any

given year, the probability of occurrence of an event greater or equal in magnitude to one of these

return period events is

𝑝 = 1/𝑇
Eq. 3

18
and the complement of this, 1 − 𝑝, is the probability of an event occurring at a lesser magnitude, which

is how the CDF is defined. Equating this complement to the fitted CDF,

1 − 𝑝 = 𝐹𝑋 (𝑥)
Eq. 4

allows solving for the point of intersection. The value of x, the metocean quantity, at this point is the

magnitude of the extreme event with the return period of interest. Figure 8 below displays this

calculation graphically.

Figure 8: Diagram of extreme event calculation. Horizontal axis is wind speed or wave height for this analysis.

Using this method, extreme event magnitudes were calculated for all four buoys, for winds and waves,

and for 50- and 500-year return periods. The wind speed values were converted to offshore turbine hub

height using the wind shear power law as explained in Section 3.1.3. Table 6 below shows all the event

magnitudes.

Note that despite Virginia Beach having a lower wind speed at the peak of its PDF than Nantucket and

Stonewall (Figure 7), it actually has the highest 50- and 500-year wind speeds of any of these sites.

Looking carefully at its distributions, it is clear that Virginia Beach extreme wind distributions have long

19
tails, indicating greater extreme conditions. For waves, the Stonewall buoy’s distribution has by far the

longest tail, leading to the greatest extreme wave heights.

Table 6: Extreme metocean conditions for all buoy sites. Red entries are the greatest magnitudes of each category.
Wind speeds are converted to hub height.
Buoy Site 50-year 50-year 500-year 500-year
Wind (m/s) Wave (m) Wind (m/s) Wave (m)
Nantucket, MA 40.8 11.5 44.6 12.7
VA Beach, VA 45.1 8.8 56.8 9.8
Stonewall, OR 37.0 13.9 38.3 16.6
Santa Maria, CA 32.5 9.2 37.1 9.8

3.4.1. Conditional Extreme Waves

The methods above treat the buoys’ metocean measurements, wind and waves, as separate data

histories, but these methods can also be adapted to consider wind and waves together. These

environmental loads act simultaneously on offshore structures, so it is important for design analyses to

examine metocean conditions as multivariate systems and to find joint extreme conditions. IEC design

load case 1.6 requires this, using the turbine’s rated wind speed and the 50-year wave height

conditioned on that speed [25]. See Table 1. Calculating that conditional extreme wave height is the

goal of this section.

The conditional extreme wave height for a particular buoy requires binning, or sorting, every data point

of wave height based on the concurrent hub-height wind speed. This is known as wind speed binning,

and it is valuable in revealing how other metocean measurements vary with wind speed. For DLC 1.6,

the specific wind speed bin of interest is the one that contains the turbine’s rated wind speed, which is

10.6 m/s at hub height for the IEA 15 MW reference wind turbine [24]. That corresponds to a bin of 10

to 11 m/s, inclusive.

To find the extreme wave heights conditioned on this bin, each buoy’s wind speed dataset is converted

to the turbine’s hub-height, using the wind shear power law (see Section 3.1.3), and then combed

20
through to pick out every wave height that occurred simultaneously with a hub-height wind speed

between 10 and 11 m/s. This creates a subset of wave heights for each buoy conditioned on the rated

wind speed. From each subset, a new, conditional list of annual wave maxima is found, and with these

maxima, the same GEV fitting and extreme event calculations are performed as explained above. These

yield new, conditional GEV distributions and new, conditional extreme wave heights for each buoy, all

conditioned on the 10.6 m/s rated wind speed.

The Figure 9 below shows how the conditional extreme wave height PDF differs from the unconditional,

original PDF, using the Nantucket buoy as an example.

Figure 9: Nantucket conditional extreme wave height distributions, conditioned on 10.6 m/s wind speed

The conditional wave PDF is narrower and has its peak at a lower wave height than the unconditional.

This is due to the correlation between wave heights and wind speeds. Wind imparts energy onto sea

waves, so specifying a certain value for the wind speed will also partially specify how much energy the

waves receive. This decreases the amount of variation in wave heights, thus narrowing the PDF. In

addition, because 10.6 m/s is not an especially high wind speed, in the context of extreme conditions,

the wave heights are also biased a bit lower.

The Table 7 below compares the unconditional and conditional 50-year extreme waves to confirm this

for all four buoys. It also contains the other unconditional extreme values calculated in this analysis for

ease of reference. The wind speeds are all converted to the IEA 15 MW turbine hub height.

21
Table 7: Extreme metocean conditions, including conditional extreme waves, for all buoy sites. Red entries are once
again the greatest magnitude of each category. Wind speeds are converted to hub height.
Buoy Site 50-year 50-year Conditional 50- 500-year 500-year
Wind (m/s) Wave (m) year Wave (m) Wind (m/s) Wave (m)
Nantucket, MA 40.8 11.5 8.4 44.6 12.7
VA Beach, VA 45.1 8.8 6.1 56.8 9.8
Stonewall, OR 37.0 13.9 9.3 38.3 16.6
Santa Maria, CA 32.5 9.2 7.6 37.1 9.8

It needs to be noted that all of these values are the products of significant extrapolations of the

available data and thus come with a large amount of uncertainty. As shown in Table 5, all of these

buoys’ histories are only 30 to 40 years long, and the numbers of usable annual maxima are fewer than

that. This means the GEV fitting and extreme event calculation process is based on relatively small data

sample sizes, so extrapolating to 50- and 500-year return periods introduces significant uncertainty. In

their recommendations, DNV GL and BOEM suggest two alternative methods for extreme value analysis

that do not depend directly on the number of years covered by the data history: peak over threshold

method and r-largest order extreme method. However, the former of these is complicated by the need

to determine proper thresholds between normal and extreme data, and both methods require verifying

the independence of the selected extreme value samples [27].

3.5. Misalignment Calculation

In addition to facilitating extreme value analysis, the imported and organized buoy metocean datasets

provided wind and wave directional time histories. The NDBC buoys report these headings as angles

clockwise from true North, from 0° to 360° (Table 3). With these headings, it was possible to calculate

wind-wave misalignment. One caveat to this calculation is that, like wind speed, wind direction

measurements are taken near the water surface, but also like the speed, the direction can vary with

elevation. This means that the misalignment angles calculated from this buoy data are only certain to

be accurate at buoy height, not necessarily hub height.

22
Misalignment is defined as the angle, Φ, between the directional heading of the wind, β, and that of the

waves, γ. The angle is taken relative to the wind heading, i.e., from wind towards waves, β to γ.

Therefore, the simple angular difference, ϕ, is

𝜑 =γ−𝛽
Eq. 5

The two headings on a 360°, circular compass will always have two possible angular differences between

them—one measured clockwise from β to γ, and one measured counterclockwise still from β to γ.

Whichever angular difference is smaller in magnitude is the proper misalignment angle, Φ, with its sign

determined by the rotational direction of that difference. Compass sign convention is used: when the

smaller angular difference is clockwise, Φ is positive, and when it is counterclockwise, Φ is negative.

However, the crossover position on the compass—i.e., the point of transition from 359° back to 0°—

complicates the calculation. When the correct, smaller misalignment angle straddles the crossover

position, simply subtracting γ – β does not yield the correct value for Φ. Logical checks and corrections

are necessary to ensure the calculation selects the proper, smaller angular difference and preserves the

sign of that difference.

The two possible angular differences, in absolute value, always sum to 360°, and the correct

misalignment angle always lies within the range -180° to 180°. Therefore, converting from the incorrect

larger difference to the smaller one simply requires adding or subtracting 360° to shift the angle into the

proper range. This correction also yields the correct sign for Φ, positive for clockwise, negative for

counterclockwise.

There are three possible cases for the misalignment calculation, two of which require corrections,

depending on the simple angular difference, ϕ:

𝜑 =𝛾−𝛽

23
 𝜑, −180° < 𝜑 ≤ 180°
Φ = {𝜑 − 360°, 𝜑 > 180
𝜑 + 360°, 𝜑 ≤ −180
Eq. 6

The first case occurs when the proper smaller difference does not straddle the 0° crossover position.

The second case occurs when the wind heading, β, is on the positive side of 0° and the wave heading, γ,

is close to 360°, i.e., just east and just west of true North, respectively. The third case is the converse of

the second, when β is close to 360° and γ is close to 0°.

This logic was implemented in Matlab to convert the entire time histories of wind and wave headings

into a time history of misalignment for each buoy.

Calculating the misalignment angle for a certain moment in time at a certain buoy requires that the

buoy took measurements of both wind and wave directions at that time. For all of the buoys, the

sample size of misalignment angles is limited by the number of wave direction measurements, which are

sparse compared to the other quantities of interest. Table 8 below compares the sizes of the three

directional datasets, wind direction, wave direction, and misalignment.

Table 8: Sizes of directional datasets

Buoy Site Sample Sizes
Wind Wave Calculated
Directions Directions Misalignment
Nantucket, MA 323,945 86,171 74,853
VA Beach, VA 246,819 221,990 203,070
Stonewall, OR 359,182 136,454 126,914
Santa Maria, CA 324,400 126,896 110,286

The Nantucket, Stonewall, and Santa Maria buoys only took wave direction measurements for some of

their operational years—not nearly as consistently as other measurements. This is especially apparent

for the Nantucket buoy, which took only 86,171 wave direction measurements, 24% of its total

timestamps (see Table 4). The Virginia Beach buoy is the exception to this, and it has by far the largest

misalignment sample size.

24
Below, Figure 10 shows the Stonewall buoy’s directional datasets as time histories to illustrate how the

wave direction is usually limiting for the misalignment calculation. The measurement gaps in wind

direction are much less commonly limiting. Also, note that the vertical axis range for misalignment is

shifted relative to the axes for the wind and wave directions.

Figure 10: Directional time histories from the Stonewall, OR buoy

3.6. Misalignment Distributions

These directional datasets are more instructive for probabilistic design analyses when represented as

polar histograms, or rose plots. Figure 11 through Figure 14 show these histograms for the directional

measurements and misalignment angles measured by the four buoys. The histogram bins are 15° wide,

like in the analysis from Barj et al. [19]. The red line indicates the mean for each distribution [33]. The

25
zero-degree location indicates true North for the wind and wave directions, and it indicates aligned

conditions for the misalignment angles.

The histograms reveal how each site’s metocean directional conditions are distinct. The Atlantic buoys,

Nantucket and VA Beach, both have very broad direction distributions for wind and waves. Because of

this, their misalignment distributions also spread across the whole range of possible values, even

showing significant occurrences of misalignment angles greater than 90° magnitude. However, the

misalignment distributions still roughly center on zero, i.e., the aligned condition, with the occurrence

gradually decreasing as wind-wave misalignment increases.

Figure 11: Nantucket polar histograms of directional datasets

Figure 12: Virginia Beach polar histograms of directional datasets

26
 Figure 13: Stonewall polar histograms of directional datasets

Figure 14: Santa Maria polar histograms of directional datasets

The directional distributions for the two Pacific buoys, Stonewall and Santa Maria, are unique. Both

have strong wave directionality, with narrow distributions around similar, western-facing headings. This

may be due to the long-distance swell waves prevalent in the Pacific Ocean. While Santa Maria also has

a narrow wind direction distribution, Stonewall’s is split between two opposite headings. Thus,

Stonewall has a broad distribution for misalignment angles but not symmetric around zero. Meanwhile,

Santa Maria’s two, narrow directional distributions yield a narrow misalignment one, as well. It is

centered off of zero, reflecting the difference between the prevailing headings for wind and waves.

27
The mean values are interesting in these distributions. They vary in how representative they are of their

actual dataset: representing well the narrow distributions, like Santa Maria, and representing poorly the

polarized ones, like VA Beach and Stonewall’s wind directions. In addition, the Nantucket, VA Beach,

and Stonewall buoys show unexpected discrepancies between the mean directions and the mean

misalignment. For two samples of two random variables, the mean of the differences between the

samples is expected to be equal to the difference of their respective means. In this case, for any given

buoy, the mean misalignment should equal the difference between the mean wind direction and mean

wave direction. However, this is not the case here because each buoy has a much larger sample size of

wind directions than of wave directions, as seen in Table 8 and Figure 10. This means that many or most

of the wind direction data points do not have a concurrent wave direction and thus do not contribute to

the misalignment dataset or its mean. All wind direction data points do factor into the wind direction

mean, though, and this heavily skews the wind direction mean relative to the misalignment mean.

3.7. Misalignment Variation by Wind Speed

To incorporate wind-wave misalignment into design analyses, the misalignment distributions in Section

3.6 need to be refined to correspond to IEC design load cases. This means binning the buoys’

misalignment datasets according to the concurrent hub-height wind speed, similar to the wind speed

binning explained in Section 3.4.1. However, instead of sorting the wave heights, this analysis sorts the

misalignment angles, and instead of a single wind speed bin, this covers all possible wind speeds, thus

sorting all misalignment data points, as well. The wind speed bins are each 2 meters-per-second wide,

and they range from 0 to 26 m/s with one additional bin for all winds exceeding this range. These bins

cover the entire operational power curve of the IEA 15 MW turbine [24] and also catch enough data

points per bin to reasonably calculate statistics.

28
For all four buoys, the entire time histories of misalignments are combed through and sorted into these

fourteen wind speed bins. With the misalignments sorted, new misalignment distributions are plotted

for all wind speed bins for all buoys. Parts (a) of Figure 15 through Figure 18 show the sets of fourteen

binned distributions for every buoy, displayed as polar histograms.

To make the bins’ statistics easier to compare, the misalignment datasets were also organized into box

plots, seen in parts (b) of the same Figure 15 through Figure 18. The properties of these box plots are

explained below.

• For each bin, the shaded box shows the interquartile range (IQR) of the data, which is the range

between the 25th to 75th percentiles.

• The colored horizontal line within the IQR box marks the bin’s median.

• Above and below the box, the whiskers extend out to the maximum and minimum non-outlier

values.

• The colored triangle markers outside the whiskers are outliers, which are defined as data points

further than 1.5 times the IQR from the edge of the box. [32]

• Therefore, the lengths of the whiskers are always less than or equal to 1.5 times the IQR.

• The circle markers connected by the solid black line show the bins’ means, and the dotted lines

on either side of them show the 95% confidence interval about those means.

For all four buoy stations, the bins trend towards decreased variation in misalignment and towards

smaller misalignment angles (closer to aligned conditions) as wind speed increases. This matches the

intuition that higher winds would provide greater energy to the waves in the same direction as the wind,

i.e., aligned with the wind. This would drown out some of the wave direction variation caused by other

factors.

29
Figure 15 (a): Binned misalignment distributions for Nantucket station

Figure 15 (b): Statistics of binned misalignment for Nantucket station

30
Figure 16 (a): Binned misalignment distributions for Virginia Beach station

Figure 16 (b): Statistics of binned misalignment for Nantucket station

31
Figure 17 (a): Binned misalignment distributions for Stonewall station

Figure 17 (b): Statistics of binned misalignment for Stonewall station

32
Figure 18 (a): Binned misalignment distributions for Santa Maria station

Figure 18 (b): Statistics of binned misalignment for Santa Maria station

33
Some of the IEC design load cases use wind speeds that line up directly with misalignment bins, but

other cases could require extrapolation. The rated wind speed of the IEA 15 MW turbine falls into the

10-12 m/s bin. However, the 50-year extreme wind speeds, which are used in other DLCs, exceed the

range of these bins by 5 m/s or more for all the sites. See Table 7.

The binning could not be extended far enough to cover those wind speeds because of the scarcity of

recorded data at those speeds. Even at the high end of the bins that were included, some of the sites

reported very little data. Santa Maria in particular had just 98 data points for the >26 m/s bin. This

small sample size is why the confidence interval increases at the higher bins, as seen in Figure 18 (b).

Meanwhile, the low wind speed bins for all the sites showed a different phenomenon, where the

possible misalignment angles actually covered the entire 360° possible range. For the buoys’ 0-2 m/s

bins, the distributions of misalignment angles are nearly uniform, as seen in parts (a) of Figure 15

through Figure 18, making the positions of the IQR boxes, medians, and means arbitrary for those bins in

parts (b). The distributions narrow over the subsequent few bins, with the rate of narrowing depending

on the site. These wide distributions cause the confidence intervals about the means to increase, but

here, the increases are driven by high variance, rather than small sample size.

As mentioned in Section 3.5, the misalignment angles measured by the buoys are at buoy height, not

hub height. However, this analysis assumes the same misalignment angles occur at both heights for the

purpose of binning the misalignment data. Since the wind direction near sea level has a greater

influence on the waves than the wind direction at higher elevation, these calculated misalignment

conditions may be closer to aligned than they would be if they considered those higher elevation winds.

This means that a wind turbine may experience even more frequent and/or higher angle misaligned

conditions than are shown here.

34
 4
MISALIGNMENT PARAMETER STUDY

4.1. Overview

With an understanding of wind-wave misalignment statistics at real-world sites, the effects of

misalignment on a multiline anchor system can be analyzed. To investigate these effects, a simulation

parameter study is run, covering a range of misaligned conditions. In this study, the independent

parameters that are varied are wave direction, misalignment angle, and design load case, and the

simulation results examined are the individual mooring line tensions and the net forces acting on a

multiline FOWT anchor.

4.1.1. Directional Cases

This study simulates several cases of wave directions and misalignment angles. The full matrix of fifteen

cases is shown in Table 9. Following the work of Fontana et al. [10], Hallowell et al. [13], and

Balakrishnan et al. [14], the hypothetical multiline anchor being simulated is connected to three FOWTs,

as shown in Figure 19. The directional cases are chosen to cover a range of loading situations that this

three-line arrangement could experience. The wave directions vary from 0° to 30° to 60° (Figure 19).

Because of the system’s symmetry, these angles cover the whole range of unique loading directions. For

each wave direction, the misalignment angles vary from 0° to 120°, also in increments of 30°. Only

positive angles are investigated as the effects of negative misalignment angles on the turbines and

multiline anchor are assumed to be symmetric. The wind directions are a dependent parameter,

calculated from the waves and misalignments for each directional case, using Eq. 6.

The directions of wind and waves are measured counterclockwise from the positive x-axis shown in

Figure 19. Misalignment angles, as explained in Section 3.5, are measured from the wind direction to

35
the wave direction. To assess the statistical stability of the results, the fifteen directional cases are

simulated for six realizations each, totaling 90 realizations across all cases. Each realization consists of

three, one-hour OpenFAST simulations to collect data on the three turbines connected to the multiline

anchor. Therefore, a full set of directional cases for a single DLC requires 270 hour-long simulations.

Table 9: Matrix of directional cases. Wave direction and misalignment angle determine the italicized wind direction
for each case, and the number of realizations appears below the wind direction.
Misalignment Angle (°)
0 30 60 90 120
0 -30 -60 -90 -120
0
×6 ×6 ×6 ×6 ×6 Wind
Wave
30 0 -30 -60 -90 Direction
Direction 30
×6 ×6 ×6 ×6 ×6 (°)
(°)
60 30 0 -30 -60 (× real.)
60
×6 ×6 ×6 ×6 ×6

Figure 19: Arrangement of a multiline anchor connected to three FOWTs. Lengths are not to scale. Block arrows
show the range of possible wave directions. Dashed lines show the coordinate system.

4.1.2. Design Load Cases

With the directions set, the other simulation parameters are determined by the choice of design load

case. This study uses the three DLCs representing the Nantucket site, whose properties are shown in

Table 10. Nantucket is suitable because, among the four sites examined in Chapter 3, it has neither the

highest nor the lowest metocean extreme values for wind or waves, and it has neither the deepest nor

36
the shallowest water. These properties make it the most generalizable set of conditions to model in this

parameter study.

Table 10: DLC conditions for Nantucket. Wind speeds are reported at IEA 15 MW turbine hub height. Currents are
wind-generated, near-surface.
Load Case Turbine Status Wind Speed Sig. Wave Peak Wave Current
(m/s) Height (m) Period (s) Speed (m/s)
Operating rotor, pitch-
DLC 1.6 10.6 8.4 10.8 0.07
controlled blades
Parked rotor, feathered
DLC 6.1 40.8 11.5 12.7 0.30
blades
Parked rotor, feathered
SLC 44.6 12.7 13.3 0.33
blades

The wind speeds and significant wave heights for these DLCs are drawn directly from the metocean

characterization of the Nantucket site in Chapter 3. Table 1 shows the definitions of these DLCs, and

Table 7 shows the corresponding metocean characteristics. Note that in this chapter, wind speeds are

always reported at the 150 m hub height of the IEA 15 MW reference wind turbine. In contrast, the

wave periods and current speeds are estimated from other values. The peak wave periods, Tp, are

calculated as

𝑇𝑝 = 11.7√𝐻𝑠 ⁄𝑔
Eq. 7

where Hs is the significant wave height, and g is standard gravity [34].

The currents specified in these DLCs are wind-generated, near-surface currents, so they are assumed to

be aligned with the wind direction for each directional case. The current speeds, Vns, are calculated as

𝑉𝑛𝑠 = 0.01 ∗ 𝑈10𝑚

Eq. 8

where U10m is the wind speed at 10 meters elevation [25]. This wind speed is found using the wind shear

power law (Eq. 1), converting the DLC wind speed from the IEA 15 MW hub height of 150 meters down

37
to 10 meters. As in Chapter 3, the power law exponent depends on the DLC in question: 0.14 for DLC

1.6, normal wind conditions, and 0.11 for DLC 6.1 and SLC, extreme wind conditions.

The IEC standard recommends using Eq. 8 for DLC 1.6 only. For the other DLCs, it recommends

calculating extreme values of current speed from site-specific metocean data. However, because long-

term current measurements are not available in the NDBC records, this study uses Eq. 8 for all three

DLCs.

A full directional case matrix, Table 9, is run for each of the DLCs, bringing the total number of

realizations for this study up to 270 and the total number of simulations to 810. The main effects of

misalignment are explored by comparing directional cases within a DLC, but simulating the three

different DLCs is instructive as some effects are more or less apparent with different wind, wave,

current, and turbine conditions.

4.2. Simulation Setup

The simulation software used for this parameter study is OpenFAST v2.4, the open-source, multi-physics

wind turbine simulator from Jonkman et al. at NREL [35]. The FOWT model implemented in OpenFAST is

the IEA 15 MW reference wind turbine, v1.0, supported by the UMaine VolturnUS-S semisubmersible

floating platform. This platform is an open-source model developed by researchers at the University of

Maine and NREL to complement the 15 MW turbine [36].

OpenFAST consists of several separate modules that are coupled together to calculate the dynamic

behavior of a FOWT. The settings within these modules specify the rotor, structure, and controls of the

FOWT and the environmental conditions it experiences. For the published FOWT model in this study,

these modules are used mostly as is. Table 11, Table 12, and Table 13 show the notable settings

38
changed in each module in order to vary the directional case and DLC. Section 4.2.2 explains the

FOWT’s mooring system, which is a custom design for this study.

4.2.1. OpenFAST Inputs

The turbulent wind conditions are specified and generated using TurbSim, which is a standalone tool

from NREL, and then the time histories of the turbulent wind fields are imported into OpenFAST with

the InflowWind module. Table 11 shows the important inputs for this part of the simulation. The

AeroDyn module, which defines the rotor design for the IEA 15 MW turbine, is left unchanged.

The wind seed listed in this table is the seed value used to generate random turbulent fluctuations in the

wind velocity. Its analogous setting for waves is the wave seed in HydroDyn (Table 13), which

determines the random fluctuations in water surface elevation that form the irregular wave field. These

two seeds are generated randomly for each of the 810 simulations in the study. As explained in Sections

4.1.1 and 4.1.2, each realization within each directional case within each DLC includes three simulations,

and each simulation represents one individual FOWT connected to the multiline anchor being studied.

Using fully randomized seeds ensures that no two FOWT simulations ever share the same wind or wave

fields. Thus, the three FOWTs in a realization behave as independent platforms, and the anchor loading

results are not skewed by any one random seed. This also means that the FOWTs experience entirely

non-correlated wind and wave fields, even though they all hypothetically operate within the same area

of a wind energy facility, connected to the same multiline anchor.

Table 11: Turbulent wind field settings and parameters in TurbSim and InflowWind
Setting/Parameter Value Unit Description
Wind seed Rand. Random seed used to generate turbulent fluctuations. This
varies by simulation within directional case/DLC.
Grid height 274 m Height of wind field extends from 2 m above ground to 6 m
above top of rotor plane.
Grid width 252 m Width of wind field extends 6 m to either side of rotor plane.
Turbulence model Kaimal Power spectral density of turbulence modeled with Kaimal
spectrum [26].

39
 Turbulence 10 % Ratio of standard deviation to mean of wind speed [26].
intensity
Wind shear profile Power Vertical variation of mean wind velocity modeled with power
type law law (PL). See Section 3.1.3.
Reference height 150 m Height of reference velocity for wind shear profile. Height set to
IEA 15 MW hub height.
Reference velocity Table m/s Wind velocity at hub height. This varies by DLC.
10
Power law 0.14 Characteristic exponent for wind shear profile. This varies by
exponent 0.11 DLC: DLC 1.6 in upper row, DLC 6.1 and SLC in lower row.
Propagation Table deg Wind field propagation direction. This varies by directional case.
direction 9

The ElastoDyn module sets the degrees of freedom (DOFs), initial positions, and structural properties of

the wind turbine components, while ServoDyn sets the electrical, drive-train, and system controls

properties. Together, these modules determine the turbine’s operational status, either operating or

parked. The structural and control design characteristics of the IEA 15 MW turbine are left as published,

but the settings for the operational status are changed as needed. Table 12 lists the settings for both

situations: operating for DLC 1.6 in the upper rows and parked for DLC 6.1 and SLC in the lower rows.

Table 12: Turbine operational settings in ElastoDyn and ServoDyn. Upper rows, operating, for DLC 1.6. Lower rows,
parked, for DLC 6.1 and SLC.
Setting/Parameter Value Unit Description
Generator DOF Free Whether the turbine’s generator can rotate freely or is fixed in
Fixed place.
Nacelle yaw DOF Fixed Nacelle yaw angle is held constant for duration of simulation,
regardless of operational status.
Blade pitch angle 0 deg Initial pitch angle for turbine blades. When operating, blades
start at 0° to be actively pitched. When parked, blades start
90
and remain at 90°, feathered to the wind.
Nacelle yaw angle Table deg Constant nacelle yaw angle. Nacelle and rotor are always
9 aligned with wind direction, which varies by directional case.
Pitch control On Whether blade pitch control system can adjust blade pitch
Off during simulation.
Variable speed On Whether variable speed torque control system can adjust rotor
control Off speed during simulation.
Generator on time 0 sec Time to turn on generator after start of simulation. If the time
is longer than the duration of the simulation, the generator will
9999
remain off.

40
The ocean waves and currents that the FOWT experiences are modeled in the HydroDyn module. Its

properties are shown in Table 13. Note that the water depth of 150 m used in this simulation is deeper

than that of the actual Nantucket site on which the metocean conditions are based (Table 2). This study

does not implement any wave directional spreading because the wave-hydrodynamic properties of the

UMaine semisubmersible platform are only published for particular discrete wave directions.

Because this version of the semisubmersible does not include a strip theory model, HydroDyn cannot

directly calculate the effect of near-surface currents on the platform. Instead, the currents’ viscous drag

force is approximated as a constant preload, F0, in the direction of the wind (current and wind are

always aligned in this study). This preload can have force components in the x- and y-directions (see

Figure 19), also known as surge and sway. These preload components are found with

𝐹0,𝑠𝑢𝑟𝑔𝑒 = 𝐷𝑞𝑢𝑎𝑑 ∗ (𝑉𝑛𝑠 )2 cos𝛽

𝐹0,𝑠𝑤𝑎𝑦 = 𝐷𝑞𝑢𝑎𝑑 ∗ (𝑉𝑛𝑠 )2 sin𝛽
Eq. 9

where Dquad is the platform’s quadratic drag factor, equal to 9.23 × 105 N/(m/s)2, Vns is the current speed

from Table 10, and β is the wind direction from Table 9. Like the current, this preload is constant in

magnitude and direction for the duration of the simulation.

Table 13: Waves, currents, and hydrodynamic properties in HydroDyn

Setting/Parameter Value Unit Description
Water depth 150 m Modeled water depth for Nantucket site.
Wave model JONSWAP Irregular waves modeled with JONSWAP spectrum.
Sig. wave height Table 10 m Significant wave height for irregular waves time history. This
varies by DLC.
Peak wave period Table 10 sec Wave period at peak of JONSWAP spectrum. This varies by
DLC.
Wave direction Table 9 deg Wave field propagation direction. This varies by DLC.
Wave spread Off Whether wave direction can spread across a range of angles.
Wave seed Random Random seed used to generate irregular waves. This varies
by simulation.
Current speed Table 10 m/s Near-surface current speed. This varies by directional case.
Current direction Table 9 deg Current direction is aligned with wind direction, which varies
by directional case.

41
 Current preload Eq. 9 N Constant preload force on floating platform due to current.
The breakdown of surge and sway components depends on
current direction, which varies by directional case.

The FAST module itself controls a few simulation settings but serves predominantly to couple together

the other modules of OpenFAST. The simulation has a duration of 4200 seconds, but it only begins

recording results after the first 600 seconds. Excluding this initial timespan gives the FOWT system time

to equilibrate with the directional case and DLC being simulated without its transient response

impacting the results. After those ten minutes, it is assumed that anything transient from the system’s

initial conditions has been drowned out by its response to the environmental loads. The remaining one

hour of simulation time is recorded.

4.2.2. Taut Mooring System Design

The most significant change to the 15 MW FOWT model for this study is the mooring system design in

the MoorDyn module of OpenFAST. Instead of the three-line, chain catenary mooring system originally

published with the UMaine platform, these simulations use a custom three-line, chain-polyester-chain

taut mooring system. The design was verified using the Nantucket DLC conditions, as explained in

Section 4.2.3. The complete MoorDyn specifications for the design are given in Appendix A.

Each of the three mooring lines consists of three segments detailed in Table 14. The main length of

each line is polyester rope, which decreases the weight of the line relative to steel chain but can also

allow it to elongate and lose tension over time. This elongation occurs in the rope segment due to creep

and settling of the fibers, increasing the rope length by as much as 6%. For this mooring system’s 737.7

meters of rope, this could add 44 m of length to each line. To correct for this, the mooring lines have

150 m of chain at the fairlead, which can be winched-in as the line lengthens. This upper chain also

facilitates a robust, permanent connection to the platform. At the lower end, each mooring line has an

additional 100 m length of chain that connects the rope to the anchor. This lower chain separates the

42
polyester from the seabed, thus protecting it from abrasion [37]. The sizes and mechanical properties of

the chain and rope segments match commercially available mooring line products [38] [39].

Table 14: Mooring line segments properties. Rope properties are for unstretched rope. Chain diameter refers to
wire diameter [38] [39].
Minimum Axial
Diameter Mass Length
Material Specification Breaking Stiffness Position
(mm) (kg/m) (m)
Load (kN) (MN)
ABS-R5 Fairlead to upper
Chain 92 169.3 9924 757 150
Studless connection point
DeepRope Upper to lower
Rope 175 20.8 9815 189 737.7
Polyester connection points
ABS-R5 Lower connection
Chain 92 169.3 9924 757 100
Studless point to anchor

This taut mooring system is designed to be repeated across an entire array of FOWTs, each with three

mooring lines connected to the three adjacent multiline anchors. This is shown in Figure 3(B) and Figure

19. Because of this strictly defined tiling arrangement, the mooring system’s geometry is determined

entirely by just the depth of the water, the position of the fairlead on the floating platform, and the

spacing from one turbine to any of the six adjacent ones. The Nantucket site water depth, d, is 150 m.

On the UMaine semisubmersible, each fairlead has a radial position, rfair, of 58 m from the center of the

platform where the turbine is located and a vertical position, zfair, of 14 m below the waterline [36]. The

turbine spacing, TS, for the hypothetical array in this study is 1800 m. For the 240-meter rotor of the IEA

15 MW turbine, this equals 7.5 rotor diameters [24]. From these quantities, the rest of the mooring line

geometry can be calculated, as shown in Figure 20. These geometric calculations assume that the size

of the multiline anchor and the position of the mooring attachment point on the anchor are negligible.

In Figure 20, the polyester segment is 2.9 m longer than that reported in Table 14 because the figure

shows the mooring system in its installed state, where the rope is stretched due to the system’s

pretension, while the table reports the rope’s shorter, unstretched length. Section 4.2.3 delves into the

43
pretension of the system. Figure 20 also assumes that the chain segments stretch only negligibly under

pretension, because they are shorter and stiffer than the rope [38] [39].

Figure 20: Taut mooring line geometry. The line lengths, taut angle, water depth, and overall turbine height are to
scale. The anchor, floating platform and turbine proportions are not. The polyester rope is shown at its
pretensioned length.

The horizontal radial distance, RD, from one fairlead to its corresponding multiline anchor is

𝑇𝑆
𝑅𝐷 = −𝑟 = 981.2 𝑚
2 sin(60°) 𝑓𝑎𝑖𝑟
Eq. 10

The vertical distance, VD, from the fairlead to the seabed where the anchor is installed is

𝑉𝐷 = 𝑑 − 𝑧𝑓𝑎𝑖𝑟 = 136 𝑚
Eq. 11

The horizontal taut angle, ψ, that the mooring line forms with the plane of the seabed is

𝑉𝐷
𝜓 = tan−1 ( ) = 7.891°
𝑅𝐷
Eq. 12

This angle is small because 150 m of water is shallow for a taut mooring system [37]. It is valuable for

conceptualizing this overall floating system to realize that the height of the turbine—150 m from the

tower base to the hub or 270 m to the blade tip—and the span of the floating platform—102 m on each

side [36]—are both comparable to the simulated water depth. This simulated site is considered deep

for fixed-bottom offshore wind development, but it is still at a similar scale to, or smaller than, the

dimensions of this offshore wind turbine system.

44
 4.2.3. Mooring System Verification

Polyester rope exhibits viscoelastic properties, meaning its stiffness can vary depending on the rate of

loading. Therefore, to ensure the custom mooring system described in Section 4.2.2 performs as

needed in all loading scenarios, the system must be verified across the range of possible rope

stiffnesses. This is done by applying the upper-lower bound model, where the mooring system is tested

in the upper and the lower limiting cases of rope stiffness, and each case must satisfy a certain

condition.

• When the rope has its upper bound stiffness, the mooring lines must not exceed a certain

threshold tension—chosen to be 50% of the line’s minimum breaking load (MBL).

• When the rope has its lower bound stiffness, the mooring lines must not allow the FOWT

platform to translate further than a certain threshold offset distance—chosen to be 10% of the

water depth at the site [37].

The first condition ensures that even in its stiffest case, the rope is not too stiff so the line tensions do

not approach the MBL. The second condition ensures that even in its least stiff case, the rope is still stiff

enough to keep the FOWT from offsetting too far.

The upper bound axial stiffness, EA, of the rope is 222 MN. This is the stiffness measured when loading

on the rope cycles between 20% and 30% of the MBL, which is an appropriate range for the tensions

recorded in these upper bound tests (Figure 21). The lower bound stiffness is 189 MN, for loading cycles

between 10% and 30% of the MBL [39]. Table 14 lists this lower bound for the rope.

To test the custom mooring system against this upper-lower bound model, six one-hour OpenFAST

simulations are run. The first three simulations check the upper bound condition. The polyester rope

has its upper bound stiffness, and the FOWT experiences the three Nantucket DLCs listed in Table 10,

one simulation per DLC, in an aligned directional case. The second three simulations check the lower

45
bound condition, using the rope’s lower bound and those same DLCs. The tensions for the first three

simulations are measured in MoorDyn at the connection between line and anchor. The offset distance,

Δrptfm, for the second three simulations, is the distance in the xy-plane that the semisubmersible

platform translates from its equilibrium position. This is calculated from ElastoDyn’s measurements of

the platform’s surge and sway displacements, Δx and Δy, respectively:

Δ𝑟𝑝𝑡𝑓𝑚 = √(Δ𝑥)2 + (Δ𝑦)2

Eq. 13

Figure 21 shows the tension results from all three mooring lines in each of the upper bound tests. All

tensions remain well below the 50% MBL threshold, satisfying the upper bound condition. The

maximum tension is 41.00% MBL, 4024 kN, from the SLC simulation. Figure 22 shows that the offsets

from the lower bound tests also remain well below the 10% water depth threshold to satisfy the lower

bound condition. In SLC, the offset reaches 8.16% water depth or 12.25 m.

The last property of the new mooring system that has to be verified is the static pretension. This is the

natural, designed-in line tension that the system experiences before any external loads act on the

FOWT. In OpenFAST, the wave and current settings are set to zero in HydroDyn, and the wind and

Figure 21: Mooring line tensions from upper bound verification test. Wind, waves, and current have 0° heading.

46
 Figure 22: Platform offsets from lower bound verification test. Wind, waves, and current have 0° heading.

aerodynamic calculations are turned off in AeroDyn and InflowWind. This situation allows the FOWT

and mooring system to sit for one hour at their equilibrium positions, as MoorDyn measures the stable

pretension values.

The acceptable range of pretension is 10% to 20% of the MBL, with preference for the lower end of this

range to decrease maximum tensions in extreme situations [37]. The static test of this taut mooring

system resulted in a mean pretention of 1069 kN across all three lines over the course of the simulated

hour. This is 10.89% of the MBL, satisfying the static test requirement. This value is stable across the

hour and across the three mooring lines. The standard deviation in the pretentions for all three lines

compiled is only 2.59 kN, and the three individual mooring lines all had mean tensions within 0.4 kN of

each other.

4.3. Multiline Anchor Force Calculation

With the parameters and settings chosen and the taut mooring system designed and verified, the full set

of 810 simulations is run. Scripts in MATLAB create and edit groups of input files for each simulation and

then execute them in TurbSim and OpenFAST. Once all simulations are complete, postprocessing scripts

47
organize the output files into sets of three, with each file representing one FOWT and each set

representing one realization of a multiline anchor connected to those three FOWTs. All three simulated

FOWTs within a set experience the same directional case and DLC but different wind and wave random

seeds.

From these sets of output files, the important measurements are the time histories of tensions in the

FOWTs’ mooring lines at the points where they connect to the multiline anchor. Each file in a set

provides one of the three tensions acting on the anchor, just as each FOWT would have one of its

mooring lines attached to this anchor. These tensions are analyzed individually, as well as summed

together as vectors to calculate the net multiline anchor force.

Fontana et al. published in 2018 their methods for calculating this net force for anchors linked to

catenary mooring systems [10]. This study uses a version of those methods generalized for taut mooring

systems. The difference in the calculation is that catenary systems exert only horizontal tension forces

on the anchor, parallel to the xy-plane. They have a taut angle of 0°. Meanwhile, taut systems can exert

both horizontal and vertical, z-direction, forces and have non-zero taut angles (Figure 20). Therefore,

multiline force calculations for taut systems must be three-dimensional and explicitly include taut angle.

As shown in Figure 19, the three mooring line tensions—T1, T2, and T3 from FOWTs 1, 2, and 3—all pull

on the multiline anchor in different directions. Therefore, finding the net multiline force vector, Tmulti,

requires resolving each tension into x-, y-, and z-components and summing them. The resulting

equations for the net force components, TX, TY, and TZ, are

𝑇𝑋 = 𝑇2 cos(𝜓) − (𝑇1 + 𝑇3 ) cos(𝜓) cos(60°)

𝑇𝑌 = (𝑇3 − 𝑇1 ) cos(𝜓) sin(60°)
𝑇𝑍 = (𝑇1 + 𝑇2 + 𝑇3 )sin (𝜓)
Eq. 14

where ψ is 7.891°, the mooring lines’ taut angle (Eq. 12). While the three line tensions vary

independently in time during the simulations, the taut angle is assumed to be equal for all lines and

48
static in time. As seen in Eq. 12, a taut angle depends on the position of a FOWT platform relative to the

multiline anchor, so the dynamic motions of the three platforms would affect the taut angles of the

three mooring lines. However, the motions are small relative to the length of the mooring lines, so they

cause only negligible changes in the taut angles. As explained in Section 4.2.3, the upper-lower bound

mooring design model ensures a maximum of 15 m of platform offset (10% of 150 m water depth). This

restricts the range of ψ to between 7.774° to 8.012°, even in the most extreme situations, which is only

a ±1.5% difference from the assumed static value of 7.891°.

From the three force components above, the magnitude, Tmulti, of the multiline force and its direction,

Θmulti, in the xy-plane can be calculated:

𝑇𝑚𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑖 = √𝑇𝑋 2 + 𝑇𝑌 2 + 𝑇𝑍 2
Θ𝑚𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑖 = atan2(𝑇𝑌 , 𝑇𝑋 )
Eq. 15

where atan2 is the two-argument arctangent, calculating angles in any quadrant of the xy-plane. Note

that Eq. 14 and Eq. 15 simplify to exactly Fontana et al.’s equations when taut angle equals 0°. The

cosine factors become unity, and the z-direction terms drop to zero.

With the time histories of T1, T2, and T3 extracted from the output files, the formulas above are used to

calculate multiline force at every timestep of all 270 realizations.

4.4. Wind and Waves Directional Effects

To develop intuition about the effects of the various parameters, the results of a few selected

directional cases are plotted in their raw form as time histories of line tensions. As an initial point of

comparison, realizations of the three aligned directional cases are plotted in Figure 23. These cases

come from the first column of the directional case matrix (Table 9), i.e., where misalignment angle is 0°

and wind, waves, and current (WWC) are all parallel at 0°, 30°, and 60°. The (a), (b), and (c) parts of this

49
figure show DLC 1.6, DLC 6.1, and SLC, respectively, which all exhibit similar behavior for this aligned

case.

For all of the DLCs, these plots provide two insights. The first is that the directional setup of the

simulations works as intended, based on the changes in mean tensions across the WWC directions. (See

Figure 19 for reference to the mooring system layout.) In the leftmost plot, the direction of the WWC is

0°. This is taut-parallel to Line 2, meaning it is parallel to that line and oriented so that FOWT 2 is

downstream of the anchor, thus pulling the line taut. This WWC direction is also evenly spaced between

Lines 1 and 3, pushing them both partially towards slack. In this position, Line 2 would be expected to

have high mean tension, and Lines 1 and 3 would have lower tensions of approximately equal mean

values. These effects directly match what is found in the simulation results for WWC = 0°. Similarly, the

rightmost plot has 60° WWC direction, which is slack-parallel to Line 1—parallel but with FOWT 1

upstream of the anchor—and evenly spaced between Lines 2 and 3, pulling them taut. Therefore, mean

tension 1 should be low, while tensions 2 and 3 should be higher, which matches the results again. The

center plot, 30° WWC, appropriately shows a compromise between 0° and 60°. Altogether, the relative

mean tensions between the three lines agree with similar mean tension distributions that Fontana et al.

found when they investigated the same WWC directions, even though their version of FAST and their

FOWT model were different from those used here [10]. This provides confidence that this simulation

setup is varying the environmental loading directions correctly.

The second insight is that changes to the WWC direction can impact the standard deviations of mooring

lines’ tensions, as well as the means. In the 0° WWC cases, Line 2 shows easily the greatest fluctuations

of the three lines, but in 60° WWC, its fluctuations have decreased and are comparable to those of Lines

1 or 3. Meanwhile, the fluctuations in Line 1 hold steady or increase from WWC = 0° to WWC = 60°,

even though its mean tension remains low. These effects are more obvious in the more extreme DLCs

as the magnitudes of the environmental loads increase.

50
 Figure 23 (a): DLC 1.6

Figure 23 (b): DLC 6.1

Figure 23 (c): SLC

Figure 23: Mooring line tension time histories in aligned metocean conditions for all three load cases. Part (a) is
DLC 1.6, (b) DLC 6.1, and (c) SLC. WWC direction refers to wind, waves, and current.

51
To explore these directional effects further, Figure 24 compares the 0° aligned directional case (same as

the leftmost plot in Figure 24) with two misaligned cases. Referring to Table 9, these three cases form

the first diagonal of the matrix. The misaligned cases maintain the 0° wind (and current) direction but

vary the wave direction to 30° and 60°. This is the first examination of a wind-wave misalignment

situation with this study’s IEA 15MW/UMaine semisubmersible setup in OpenFAST. It further validates

the directional setup and indicates how wind and wave directions separately influence the mooring

system.

Figure 24 (a): DLC 1.6

Figure 24 (b): DLC 6.1

52
 Figure 24 (c): SLC
Figure 24: Mooring line tensions time histories with 0° wind direction and varying wave directions. Part (a) is DLC
1.6, (b) DLC 6.1, and (c) SLC.

As the wave direction shifts from 0° to 30° to 60° across these plots, the respective mean tensions in

Lines 1, 2, and 3 remain nearly constant. For DLC 1.6, Line 2 has a mean tension of 2576 kN for 0°

waves, 2594 kN for 30°, and 2587 kN for 60°. This is a range of less than 1%. The mean tensions in the

other DLCs have similarly narrow ranges. The mean tensions staying constant relative to the 0° aligned

directional case, even as the wave direction changes, suggests that the mean value of a mooring line’s

tension is not affected by its orientation relative to the wave direction. As shown in Figure 23 though,

the direction of the combined wind, waves, and current does affect these mean tensions. Therefore, it

must be wind and current direction that predominantly determine mean line tensions.

Figure 24 also shows that the amount of fluctuation about those mean tension levels does change

significantly for each line as wave direction shifts. In the 0° waves case, Line 2 is taut-parallel to the

waves, and its tension shows large fluctuations. These decrease in the 30° and 60° cases as the waves

move away from parallel with that line. Meanwhile, the tension fluctuations in Line 1 actually peak in

the 60° case, where it is slack-parallel to the waves. Its standard deviations for DLC 6.1 and SLC actually

exceed those of Line 2 despite Line 2’s greater mean tensions. All these shifts in standard deviation

occur while the wind direction stays fixed at 0°. This indicates that the wave direction, not wind, has the

53
greater impact on the standard deviation of tension in a mooring line. In addition, these changes in Line

1 and Line 2 tensions show that wave direction can be taut-parallel or slack-parallel with a mooring line

and still increase its standard deviation. This is unlike the wind direction, which must pull a mooring line

in the taut orientation in order to increase the mean tension, as seen in Figure 23.

The wind direction does still impact the standard deviation but to a lesser extent than the waves. Taut-

parallel wind increases standard deviation while slack-parallel decreases it. This is visible when

comparing the leftmost plots between Figure 23 (a) and Figure 24 (a). The fluctuations in Line 2 are

decreased in both plots because the waves are not parallel with that line, but the fluctuations in Figure

24’s plot are slightly greater (than Figure 23’s) because the wind is still taut-parallel with Line 2 in Figure

24. Line 1 in these same plots shows the converse effect. Waves are parallel to that line in both plots,

enhancing its fluctuations, but these fluctuations in Figure 23’s plot are slightly suppressed by the wind

direction being slack-parallel at 60°.

4.4.1. Zero-Tension Events

An unexpected consequence of these directional effects on this taut mooring system is that a mooring

line can briefly experience zero tension. This can occur when a line has both low mean tension, due to

slack-parallel wind, and high variance in tension, due to taut- or slack-parallel waves. The most

prominent example of this is Line 1 in the SLC 60° aligned directional case, shown in the righthand plot

of Figure 23 (c). In that time history, there are several fluctuations in tension that drop down to zero

due to extreme waves. Figure 25 shows the behavior of these fluctuations in greater detail.

When a group of large waves impacts FOWT 1 at around 3000 seconds, the tension on Line 1 fluctuates

dramatically, but when decreasing to a trough, it abruptly flattens out at zero, interrupting the expected

curvature of the plot. This causes the time history of Line 1 tension to look slightly asymmetrical about

its mean value. This occurs because the mooring line cannot exert negative tension, i.e., compression,

54
on the anchor. It instead simply goes slack and exerts no tension for a short time until the periodic

forcing of the waves pulls the line taut again, raising its tension.

Figure 25: Detail of zero-tension events in Line 1 in SLC 60° aligned directional case. Green boxes show the zones of
magnification for zoom 1 and 2.

These zero-tension events do not significantly affect the anchor loading results from this study. The

tension time histories do not exhibit any snap loads when the mooring lines transition from slack back to

taut. In addition, the periods of tension fluctuations consistently match the dominant wave periods for

the simulated DLCs (Table 10), regardless of the zero-tension events. Each one of these events has a

significantly shorter duration than this period, so the oscillating character of the plot is not affected,

aside from a few truncated troughs.

These zero-tension events are infrequent, as well. With a conservative threshold of 50 kN, below which

a tension fluctuation is considered a zero-tension event, only a small percentage of the fluctuations in

the simulations drop low enough to count. Even in the worst-case scenario of SLC 60° aligned

directional case (Figure 25), these zero-tension events occur only 39 times per hour on average. This is

when the FOWT and mooring system are experiencing the 500-year extreme wind and wave conditions.

All other DLCs and directional cases exhibit less frequent events. In the operational case, DLC 1.6, all

55
fifteen directional cases show zero or less than one event per hour. For the two extreme DLCs, eighteen

of thirty cases also show less than one event per hour.

Any frequency of these zero-tension events is still undesirable for a taut mooring system such as this,

where the lines are intended to stay tensioned at all times. However, the short duration, infrequency,

and lack of snap loads or other effects mean that these events do not significantly affect the anchor

loading results presented in Sections 4.5 and 4.6.

4.5. Multiline Force Direction Distributions

An important property of FOWT multiline anchor systems, in contrast to single-line systems, is that the

direction of multiline force on the anchor can vary across a complete 360° range in the horizontal plane.

This changes the demand on the anchor designs, requiring them to have omnidirectional capacity and

withstand changes in loading direction [10]. This direction depends on the relative magnitudes of the

three mooring line tensions (see Eq. 15), which, as explained in Section 4.4, can vary with wind-wave

misalignment.

Figure 26 shows the relationship between multiline force directionality and misalignment directional

case. It consists of fifteen polar histograms of force direction. Each histogram displays all the calculated

force direction data points from the six realizations for one particular directional case—six hours of

simulations for each. The bar lengths are all normalized, but between histograms, the radial scale of the

bars can vary in order to emphasize each distribution’s shape. In addition, the bin widths are set to only

10° because the data distributions are narrow compared to those in Chapter 3. The plotted green and

blue arrows show the directions of the wind and waves. Overall, the grid of the histograms follows

Table 9’s template, with each row representing one wave direction and each column one misalignment

angle. Parts (a) and (b) of Figure 26 show the force direction distributions for DLC 1.6 and SLC, with DLC

6.1 omitted because it is very similar to SLC.

56
By comparing these histograms, it is clear that the wind direction determines the mean direction of the

multiline anchor force. This is consistent with the observation that the wind direction determines which

mooring lines have the greater mean tensions, as explained in Section 4.4. In all DLCs and directional

cases in Figure 26, the probability distributions roughly center on the wind direction (the green arrow).

All mean direction values are within 5.5° of their respective wind directions, and for DLC 1.6, they are

within 1.8°. Therefore, when predicting the loading directions that a multiline FOWT anchor will

experience, project developers and anchor designers can focus on characterizing the wind direction,

rather than the waves. This could be important for locations, such as the Stonewall and Santa Maria

buoy sites off the U.S. Pacific coast, where prevailing wind and waves approach from different headings

(Figure 13 and Figure 14).

Figure 26 (a): DLC 1.6

57
 Figure 26 (b): SLC
Figure 26: Polar histograms of multiline force direction in the xy-plane for all directional cases of (a) DLC 1.6 and (b)
SLC. Bins are 10° wide and normalized to probability. Green and blue arrows show wind and wave directions. Each
row of plots represents one wave direction, and each column one misalignment angle.

Apart from the mean values, the spreads of these distributions indicate how variable the multiline force

direction is for different misalignment conditions, which could be important to the anchors’

performance. The spreads of these distributions vary depending on directional case. This is visible in

the SLC plots where higher misalignment angles, such as 90° and 120°, show broader distributions of

force direction about their means. The standard deviations of the direction data, shown in Table 15,

corroborate this trend. All DLCs show increased standard deviation in the more misaligned directional

cases, 60°, 90°, and 120°, due to the transverse loading from the waves. However, the values increase

only moderately, in absolute terms. The greatest increase in standard deviation of multiline force

direction is in the SLC 30°-waves row, where from aligned conditions to 90° misaligned, the standard

58
deviation increases by 8.6°, from 13.0° to 21.6°. The increases in DLC 1.6 are smaller, with each row of

standard deviations only changing by 5.3° or less.

Table 15: Standard deviation of multiline anchor force direction for all directional cases of DLC 1.6 and SLC. Darker
shaded cells indicate higher values. Standard deviations for each case are averaged over the six realizations.
Misalignment Angle (°) Misalignment Angle (°)
DLC 1.6 SLC
0 30 60 90 120 0 30 60 90 120
Wave 0 4.0 7.3 9.3 8.3 5.2 Wave 0 13.6 17.3 20.5 19.2 17.2
Dir. (°) 30 6.1 4.4 7.6 9.2 8.1 Dir. (°) 30 13.0 15.3 19.6 21.6 20.3
60 6.6 5.9 5.1 8.3 9.7 60 13.3 13.4 15.9 19.6 21.5
Multiline Force Direction Multiline Force Direction
Standard Deviation (°) Standard Deviation (°)

DLC 1.6 is the operational load case, representing conditions that, while severe, could occur regularly,

which makes it the best indicator of the cyclic loading profile that a multiline FOWT anchor could

experience. As Table 15 shows, misaligned directional cases cause only minor increases to the loading

direction standard deviations for multiline anchors. Therefore, even if cyclic loading is found to be an

important anchor design driver, additional variation of load direction due to misalignment would not be

a significant concern for such anchors’ cyclic loading performance. On the other hand, if load direction

variation under extreme conditions, rather than operational ones, drives design choices, then the

increases to standard deviation seen for SLC in Table 15 may be notable. Such direction variation could

be a concern if it could cause a multiline anchor to rotate in the seabed during an extreme event.

4.6. Multiline Anchor Loading Statistics

In Section 4.4, several misalignment directional cases are compared by plotting the time histories of the

mooring line tensions. To explore the effects of misalignment on mooring line tensions and on multiline

force across all parameters of this study, the simulation results are now examined as means, maxima,

and standard deviations. Several of the plots of these statistics are displayed as examples and analyzed

in this section, and all of them are compiled in Appendix B.

59
 4.6.1. Mean Loads

Figure 27 shows the mean tension values of the three mooring lines across all direction cases of DLC 6.1,

and Figure 28 shows the mean multiline force values across the same cases. To cover all fifteen cases,

each figure splits the data into three plots, one for each wave direction, i.e., each row of Table 9. Each

of these plots has two horizontal axes; the main one for misalignment angle is consistent across all plots,

while the reference axis above that shows the wind direction at each plotted data point to help ground

the directional cases in physical parameters. Each directional case displays statistics from all six of its

realizations, with a horizontal bar at each group of six points to show their sample average. The black

dashed lines connect these sample averages. This presentation is common for all loading statistics

figures in Section 4.6. For the figures of mean tension and force values below, only DLC 6.1 is shown,

but all three DLCs exhibited similar behavior.

In all DLCs, the data points from the six realizations of each case are almost identical, causing them to be

closely overlaid and difficult to discern. The mean values of mooring line tensions and multiline force

are very stable through the realizations, which was expected considering the reference wind speed and

current forcing remain the same.

Because the mean tension in a mooring line is predominantly determined by the wind direction relative

to the line’s orientation and is almost unaffected by wave direction, Figure 27’s plots of mean line

tension versus misalignment effectively show the mean tension versus wind direction. Varying the

misalignment angle rotates the wind thrust force around the 3-line mooring system, which yields a

three-phase, periodic response from the system, where each line’s tension is 120° phase-shifted from

the other two—just as each mooring line is 120° physically separated from the other two (Figure 19).

Each line experiences a peak in tension when the wind is taut-parallel to it and a trough when the wind

60
is slack-parallel. This is apparent in the 0°-wave plot where both Line 1 and Line 2 show their peaks

at -120° and 0° wind directions, respectively, and Line 3 shows its trough at -60°.

These three mooring line tensions are vector-summed and then averaged at each directional case to

calculate the mean multiline forces in Figure 28. These forces are remarkably stable across wave

directions and misalignment angles. The evenly spaced three-phase line tension levels cancel out any

variation in the mean of the summed force. This occurs in all three DLCs, the only difference being the

level of that mean summed force. DLC 1.6 has the highest mean multiline force, with directional cases

varying between 1865 kN and 1926 kN. DLC 6.1 has the lowest means, varying between 1197 kN and

1260 kN. This amounts to a range of less than 6% for any one DLC.

Figure 27: Mean mooring line tensions from all DLC 6.1 simulations. The means from the six realizations for each
data point are almost identical to each other, so the markers are overlaid.

61
 Figure 28: Mean multiline forces from all DLC 6.1 realizations.

4.6.2. Maximum Loads

The maximum load an anchor must withstand is important to the design, so the maximum tensions in

individual mooring lines and maximum forces from all three lines are examined here. Figure 29 shows

the mooring line tensions while Figure 30 shows the multiline forces across all directional cases for SLC

conditions. SLC causes the greatest maximum loads on the lines and the multiline anchor, so it is the

defining load case of this study for an anchor’s ultimate capacity.

In these maxima plots, the spreads of values between the six realizations of each directional case are

much broader, with the sample averages of those realizations shown with horizontal bars. As expected,

these maxima are not as stable across realizations as the mean line tension and mean multiline force

values in Figure 27 and Figure 28. The irregular wave fields in each realization cause spikes in tension or

force that are less predictable. The same observations can be made for the maxima from DLCs 1.6 and

6.1.

62
Figure 29: Maximum line tensions for SLC.

Figure 30: Maximum multiline force for SLC.

63
In Figure 30, and for all DLCs, the misalignment angle correlates with a decrease in maximum multiline

force. In SLC with 0° waves, the maximum decreases from 3339 kN in the aligned case to 2562 kN with

120° misalignment, a 23.3% drop in maximum force (sample averages). The 30° waves cases show a

similar trend, decreasing by 18.0% across the plot. These trends hold true in DLC 1.6 and 6.1, as well.

However, the 60° waves cases behave differently. In SLC, the maximum force decreases minimally, less

than 2.5%, between aligned and 120° misaligned. Instead, the force increases by 10.7% between 0 and

60° misalignment and then decreases between 60 and 120°. Similar local peaks at 60° misalignment

with 60° waves also appear in DLC 1.6 and DLC 6.1. This indicates that other parameters in these

directional cases may be impacting the maximum multiline force.

In each of the three plots in Figure 30, the wave direction stays constant while misalignment angle

increases, but the wind direction must also change to effect the change in misalignment angle. This

means the wind may be impacting the maximum multiline force levels. However, when these results

are examined with wind direction held constant (and wave direction shifting to increase misalignment),

the misalignment angle still correlates with decreased maximum multiline force. The three 0° wind

cases in Figure 30 illustrate this. The first case is 0° aligned, the second case is 30° misaligned (30°

waves), the third case is 60° misaligned (60° waves). Across these cases, the maximum multiline force

decreases from 3339 kN to 3154 kN to 2700 kN, a 19.1% drop from aligned to 60° misaligned. Similar

trends occur for other constant wind directions (such as -30° and -60°) and for the other the two DLCs.

Thus, for constant wave direction and for constant wind direction, multiline anchor force trends towards

lower maximum values as misalignment angle increases.

This is instructive because it confirms current intuition and practices which consider only aligned

metocean conditions for studies of multiline anchors’ ultimate capacities and design requirements. For

multiline anchors, aligned conditions do drive the design capacity. The importance of aligned conditions

is only enhanced by the findings from the metocean analysis in Chapter 3, which showed that as wind

64
speeds become more extreme, metocean conditions shift towards alignment or near-alignment. This

means that in more extreme circumstances, an anchor would likely have to handle the full brunt of

aligned wind and waves, without significant decrease in force due to misalignment.

4.6.3. Multiline Anchor Load Reduction

Comparing maximum and mean values of line tensions to those statistics of multiline forces shows a

load reduction as reported by Fontana et al. from their simulations, except to a greater degree. Fontana

et al. reported an 11% drop in maximum anchor force, relative to a single-line anchor, for a 0° wind-

wave aligned SLC simulation [10]. In this study, the difference between the maximum single-line and

multiline anchor forces (for the same aligned directional case) is almost 19%. For mean anchor forces,

Fontana et al. reported a 32% drop in force from single- to multiline anchors for 0° aligned SLC, while

this study showed a 34% drop. This study’s 30° and 60° aligned cases also showed larger drops than

Fontana’s. There are several possible reasons for this, including the differences in metocean conditions

and the FOWT model between the Fontana study and this one. However, another substantial change

may come from the different mooring system. Unlike the catenary system used by Fontana, the taut

system used here starts off with significant pretensions in all mooring lines. Aside from station-keeping,

these pretensions may serve to provide extra force cancellation (one line’s tension counteracting

another’s) for the anchor, thus reducing the net force even further.

4.6.4. Standard Deviation of Loads

As mentioned in Section 4.5, the standard deviation of multiline force is important when analyzing an

anchor’s response to cyclic loading, and the load case most relevant to this type of long-term, repetitive

loading is DLC 1.6. The standard deviations for this DLC are shown in Figure 31 (mooring line tensions)

and Figure 33 (multiline force). For comparison and to reveal the loading fluctuations possible in an

65
extreme event, Figure 32 and Figure 34 show the standard deviations of SLC (line tensions and multiline

force, respectively).

Figure 31: Standard deviation of line tensions for DLC 1.6.

The standard deviations of the mooring line tensions across all directional cases in Figure 31 and Figure

32 confirm that a mooring line’s standard deviation of tension depends strongly on its orientation

relative to the wave direction. In SLC, the standard deviations for Line 1 increase dramatically as the

waves shift from 0° to 30° to 60° across the three plots. With 60° waves, it has the highest standard

deviations of the three lines. DLC 1.6 shows a weaker version of the same trend. In that DLC, the wind

thrust is a much greater driver of mooring line loads than the wave fluctuations, so the wind’s effect on

the lines’ standard deviations partly obscures the waves’ effect. Comparing the DLC 1.6 figure with the

SLC one also confirms that standard deviations in all lines and directional cases increase as DLCs become

more extreme. This is due to the increasing wave heights.

66
 Figure 32: Standard deviation of line tensions for SLC.

For the multiline force, Figure 33 and Figure 34 show that the standard deviation can decrease at high

misalignment angles, especially in more extreme DLCs. Overall, across the directional cases, DLC 1.6 has

a slight trend towards decreased standard deviation, but the change in the SLC plots is more

pronounced. In SLC 0° waves, from the aligned case to the 90° misaligned case, the standard deviation

of multiline force decreases by 32.4%. Such decreases make misalignment potentially important to

determining the cyclic loading on an anchor. If misalignment decreases the variation in multiline forces,

then understanding how probable misaligned conditions are could allow anchor designers to decrease

the cyclic loading design requirements. However, it must be noted that the metocean conditions in this

study that create the largest drops in the multiline force standard deviation, i.e., SLC, also have low

probability of occurrence. These are extreme wind and wave conditions that are unlikely to occur in

general and even less likely to occur with the high misalignment angles associated with the drop in

67
standard deviation. Section 3.7 shows that as wind speeds become more extreme, high misalignment is

less likely.

Conditions similar to DLC 1.6 are more common in general and more likely to be coupled with higher

misalignment angles. They show smaller drops in standard deviation than the SLC results and even

show increases with misalignment between some directional cases. However, even these modest

decreases in the load amplitude distribution for a cyclic loading analysis could have a significant effect

on design because of the logarithmic scales of fatigue-life models. This is assuming from the start that

the cyclic loading requirement is driving the anchor design in this hypothetical application.

Overall, the standard deviation does vary significantly across DLC 1.6’s range of misalignment, and the

DLC 6.1 and SLC plots indicate that more extreme conditions paired with misalignment could produce

more pronounced drops in standard deviation. Together, these factors suggest that anchor design

analyses could benefit from considering a range of misalignment angles and their probabilities of

occurrence. This is especially true for locations like the Stonewall and Santa Maria buoy sites that

experience high probability of misaligned conditions (Figure 13 and Figure 14). When characterizing the

cyclic loading that an anchor must withstand at a certain project site, taking these probabilities into

account could result in decreased estimates for the standard deviation of load. This, in turn, could lower

the necessary cyclic loading amplitudes for the site and thus allow for smaller, cheaper multiline

anchors. But even without such a change in the anchor design process, these findings offer a

confirmation of the current practice—that characterizing only aligned wind and wave conditions for an

anchor’s cyclic analysis is a conservative decision and will lead to a robust design.

68
Figure 33: Standard deviation of multiline force for DLC 1.6.

Figure 34: Standard deviation of multiline force for SLC.

69
 5
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

Multiline anchors are a novel way to reduce the cost of electricity from floating offshore wind energy.

They decrease the number of anchors, seafloor surveys, and anchor installations needed for an array of

FOWTs. Through metocean characterization and dynamic FOWT simulations, this thesis draws several

conclusions about the effects of wind-wave misalignment on multiline anchor systems.

Four coastal U.S. sites near offshore wind development areas are characterized. Historical metocean

data is used to estimate parameters for IEC DLCs at each site and to analyze real wind-wave

misalignment. Each site exhibits unique misalignment probability distributions. The Pacific sites at

Stonewall Bank and Santa Maria have prevailing misaligned conditions, which makes the understanding

of misalignment especially important to offshore wind development there. For all analysis sites, sorting

misalignment data by the concurrent wind speed showed that the misalignment angle becomes less

variable as wind speed increases. The distributions of misalignment angle narrow down and converge

near zero as wind speed increases, indicating that high misalignment angles are unlikely to occur with

high wind speeds, such as in SLC.

A simulation parameter study, spanning a range of wave directions, misalignment angles, and design

load cases, is run to explore how misalignment affects multiline anchor loading. The simulations are run

in OpenFAST using the IEA 15 MW FOWT model and metocean conditions representing the Nantucket

site. The hypothetical multiline anchor being tested is connected to three FOWTs via taut mooring lines.

The simulation results demonstrate that for each individual mooring line, the mean tension level

depends on the direction of the wind relative to the line. Meanwhile, the standard deviation of tension

predominantly depends on the direction of the waves.

70
The net multiline anchor force is calculated by summing the three tension vectors from the lines. The

direction of this force is found to align closely with the direction of the wind in all cases; each mean

force direction is within 5.5° of the wind direction for that simulation. The amount of directional

variation around that mean, however, increases as misalignment angle increases. In DLC 1.6, the

standard deviations of the direction increase only slightly, from 4.0° to 9.3°, at most. The increase in SLC

was greater, from 13.0° to 21.6°, at most. If directional variation of load under extreme conditions

drives design choices, then the increases to standard deviation seen for SLC may be notable. Such

directional variation could be a concern if it could cause a multiline anchor to rotate in the seabed

during an extreme event.

The relationships between misalignment and multiline force magnitude are also examined. The mean

force level is found to be nearly unaffected by misalignment angle, with values differing by less than 6%

across misalignment angles within any one DLC. This is because as wind direction changes, the levels of

mean tensions redistribute between the three mooring lines, but the vector-summed multiline force

remains stable. The maximum multiline force, on the other hand, decreases as misalignment angle

increases (within the range of misalignment tested in this study). In SLC, the maximum force decreases

by as much as 23.3%, from the 0°-aligned case to the 120° misaligned case. Standard deviation of

multiline force also decreases as misalignment increases. DLC 1.6 shows a slight trend in this direction,

but the decrease in SLC is much more pronounced, at 32.4%.

These multiline force results offer insight into how misalignment could inform anchor design practices.

For specifying an anchor’s ultimate loading capacity, the trend in the maximum force confirms current

practices, which treat aligned metocean conditions as the peak load an anchor experiences. In contrast,

the trend in standard deviation of multiline force suggests that current practices for cyclic loading

analysis could benefit from considering a range of misalignment angles. This is especially relevant for

locations with prevailing misalignment. Acknowledging that misalignment lowers the standard deviation

71
of load in some situations and that it occurs with a known probability could, in turn, lower the

distribution of cyclic loading amplitudes that an anchor design must withstand. This could allow for

smaller, cheaper anchors. However, even without this change in the anchor design process, these

finding still confirm that the current practice—which only characterizes aligned wind and wave

conditions for anchors’ cyclic analysis—is the conservative practice and will lead to robust anchor

designs.

Future work on wind-wave misalignment and multiline FOWT anchors can investigate several areas. The

parameter study in this thesis can be broadened to include the following:

• Misalignment angles up to the maximum of 180°

• Wave directional spreading

• More varied wind speeds and wave heights, such as from other sites and DLCs

These three expansions would help confirm and clarify the trends in mooring line tensions and multiline

anchor forces found by this study. These parameter study results could also be used to explore

misalignment effects on the vertical component of multiline anchor force. Vertical loading

perpendicular to the seabed (TZ from Eq. 14) is a unique characteristic of taut mooring systems which

would be valuable to analyze on its own through the lens of wind-wave misalignment. In this study, it is

only analyzed indirectly as a component of the multiline force magnitudes, but in a future study, it could

be split off into its own statistics and analysis. In addition, further research into how standard deviation

of multiline force relates to misalignment could be especially impactful. The connections found in this

study suggest possible new methods for characterizing cyclic loading for multiline anchors. Future

studies could flesh out these ideas into new design practices, using site-specific misalignment

distributions and standard-deviation-versus-misalignment curves to develop misalignment-adjusted

distributions of cyclic loading amplitudes.

72
 A
TAUT MOORING SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS

The complete specifications of the taut mooring system used in the misalignment parameter study

(Chapter 4) is given below in MoorDyn format. The polyester rope is set to its upper bound properties.

--------------------- MoorDyn Input File ------------------------------------

IEA 15 MW offshore reference model on UMaine VolturnUS-S semi-submersible floating
platform mooring model- C. Allen UMaine
False Echo - echo the input file data (flag)
----------------------- LINE TYPES ------------------------------------------
2 NTypes - number of LineTypes
Name Diam MassDen EA BA/-zeta Can Cat Cdn Cdt
(-) (m) (kg/m) (N) (N-s/-) (-) (-) (-) (-)
chain 0.163 169.300 7.57E+08 -1 0.563 0.282 1.352 0.648
rope 0.138 18.62 2.22E+08 -1 1.396 0.190 0.888 0.027
---------------------- CONNECTION PROPERTIES --------------------------------
12 NConnects - number of connections including anchors and fairleads
Node Type X Y Z M V FX FY FZ CdA CA
(-) (-) (m) (m) (m) (kg) (m^3) (kN) (kN) (kN) (m^2) (-)
1 Vessel 29.000 50.229 -14.000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2 Vessel -58.000 0.000 -14.000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
3 Vessel 29.000 -50.229 -14.000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
4 Connect 103.290 178.903 -34.593 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
5 Connect -206.580 0.000 -34.593 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
6 Connect 103.290 -178.903 -34.593 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
7 Connect 470.089 814.217 -136.271 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
8 Connect -940.177 0.000 -136.271 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
9 Connect 470.089 -814.217 -136.271 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
10 Fixed 519.615 900.000 -150.000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
11 Fixed -1039.230 0.000 -150.000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
12 Fixed 519.615 -900.000 -150.000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
---------------------- LINE PROPERTIES --------------------------------------
9 NLines - number of line objects
Line LineType UnstrLen NumSegs NodeAnch NodeFair Flags/Outputs
(-) (-) (m) (-) (-) (-) (-)
1 chain 150.0 30 4 1 -
2 chain 150.0 30 5 2 -
3 chain 150.0 30 6 3 -
4 rope 737.7 74 7 4 -
5 rope 737.7 74 8 5 -
6 rope 737.7 74 9 6 -
7 chain 100.0 20 10 7 -
8 chain 100.0 20 11 8 -
9 chain 100.0 20 12 9 -
---------------------- SOLVER OPTIONS ---------------------------------------
0.001 dtM - time step to use in mooring integration (s)
3.0e6 kbot - bottom stiffness (Pa/m)
3.0e5 cbot - bottom damping (Pa-s/m)

73
1.0 dtIC - time interval for analyzing convergence during IC gen (s)
60.0 TmaxIC - max time for ic gen (s)
4.0 CdScaleIC - factor by which to scale drag coefficients during dynamic
relaxation (-)
0.001 threshIC - threshold for IC convergence (-)
------------------------ OUTPUTS --------------------------------------------
FairTen1
FairTen2
FairTen3
AnchTen7
AnchTen8
AnchTen9
fx
fy
fz
END
------------------------- need this line --------------------------------------

74
 B
COMPLETE ANCHOR LOAD STATISTICS

All statistics calculated for the three DLCs of the misalignment parameter study (Chapter 4) are

presented here, beginning on the following page. Several figures are repeated from Section 4.6. These

are identified as “Duplicate of.”

75
Figure 35: Mean line tensions for DLC 1.6.

Figure 36: Mean multiline force for DLC 1.6.

76
Figure 37: Maximum line tensions for DLC 1.6.

Figure 38: Maximum multiline force for DLC 1.6.

77
 Figure 39: Duplicate of Figure 31. Standard deviation of line tensions for DLC 1.6.

Figure 40: Duplicate of Figure 33. Standard deviation of multiline force for DLC 1.6.

78
Figure 41: Duplicate of Figure 27. Mean line tensions for DLC 6.1.

Figure 42: Duplicate of Figure 28. Mean multiline force for DLC 6.1.

79
Figure 43: Maximum line tensions for DLC 6.1.

Figure 44: Maximum multiline force for DLC 6.1.

80
 Figure 45: Standard deviation of line tensions for DLC 6.1.

Figure 46: Standard deviation of multiline force for DLC 6.1.

81
Figure 47: Mean line tensions for SLC.

Figure 48: Mean multiline force for SLC.

82
Figure 49: Duplicate of Figure 29. Maximum line tensions for SLC.

Figure 50: Duplicate of Figure 30. Maximum multiline force for SLC.

83
 Figure 51: Duplicate of Figure 32. Standard deviation of line tensions for SLC.

Figure 52: Duplicate of Figure 34. Standard deviation of multiline force for SLC.

84
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