Offshore Code Comparison Collaboration (OC3) for IEA Task 23 offshore wind technology and deployment

Wind turbines are designed and analyzed using simulation tools (i.e., design codes) capable of predicting the coupled dynamic loads and responses of the system.Land-based wind turbine analysis relies on the use of aero-servo-elastic codes, which incorporate wind-inflow, aerodynamic (aero), control system (servo), and structural-dynamic (elastic) models in the time domain in a coupled simulation environment. In recent years, some of these codes have been expanded to include the additional dynamics pertinent to offshore installations, including the incident waves, sea current, hydrodynamics, and foundation dynamics of the support structure. The sophistication of these aero-hydro-servo-elastic codes, and the limited data available with which to validate them, underscore the need to verify their accuracy and correctness. The Offshore Code Comparison Collaboration (OC3), which operates under Subtask 2 of the International Energy Agency (IEA) Wind Task 23, was established to meet this need. The OC3 project was performed through technical exchange among a group of international participants from universities, research institutions, and industry across the United States of America, Germany, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Korea. Moreover, most of the aero-hydro-servo-elastic codes developed for modeling the dynamic response of offshore wind turbines were tested within OC3.