Development of a Simulation Tool for Floating Offshore Wind Turbines Using MBDyn

For the design of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs), numerical simulations for a large number of design load cases (DLCs) are required. Now, several numerical tools have been developed and available, such as Bladed and OrcaFlex; however, the number of licenses may limit the efficiency of the analysis. In this paper, we report on the latest progress of the development of a simulation tool for FOWTs using MBDyn. MBDyn is an open-source software of multibody dynamics. We have developed several user-defined modules that extend MBDyn to be used for dynamic analysis of FOWTs. Using this tool, we will be able to run many simulations simultaneously without a limit of the number of software licenses. Several numerical examples will be given as comparison with the results obtained by ADAMS.