An accurate study of a floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) system requires 16 interdisciplinary knowledge about wind turbine aerodynamics, floating platform 17 hydrodynamics and mooring line dynamics, as well as interaction between these 18 discipline areas. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) provides a new means of 19 analysing a fully coupled fluid-structure interaction (FSI) system in a detailed manner. 20 In this paper, a numerical tool based on the open source CFD toolbox OpenFOAM for 21 application to FOWTs will be described. Various benchmark cases are first modelled 22 to demonstrate the capability of the tool. The OC4 DeepCWind semi-submersible 23 FOWT model is then investigated under different operating conditions. 24 With this tool, the effects of the dynamic motions of the floating platform on the wind 25 turbine aerodynamic performance and the impact of the wind turbine aerodynamics 26 on the behaviour of the floating platform and on the mooring system responses are 27 examined. The present results provide quantitative information of three-dimensional 28 FSI that may complement related experimental studies. In addition, CFD modelling 29 enables the detailed quantitative analysis of the wind turbine flow field, the pressure 30 distribution along blades and their effects on the wind turbine aerodynamics and the 31 hydrodynamics of the floating structure, which is difficult to carry out experimentally

In this paper, we present numerical modelling for the investigation of dynamic responses of a floating offshore wind turbine subject to focused waves. The modelling was carried out using a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool. We started with the generation of a focused wave in a numerical wave tank based on a first-order irregular wave theory, then validated the developed numerical method for wave-structure interaction via a study of floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) to focused wave. Subsequently, we investigated the wave-/wind-structure interaction of a fixed semi-submersible platform, a floating semi-submersible platform and a parked National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) 5 MW floating offshore wind turbine. To understand the nonlinear effect, which usually occurs under severe sea states, we carried out a systematic study of the motion responses, hydrodynamic and mooring tension loads of floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) over a range of wave steepness, and compared the results obtained from two potential flow theory tools with each other, i.e., Électricité de France (EDF) in-house code and NREL Fatigue, Aerodynamics, Structures, and Turbulence (FAST). We found that the nonlinearity of the hydrodynamic loading and motion responses increase with wave steepness, revealed by higher-order frequency response, leading to the appearance of discrepancies among different tools.