Pitch motion suppression in floating platforms with flywheel mechanism: Concept and model

Wind energy presents a big contribution in the renewable energy production worldwide. The push to offshore wind farms can increase even more the capabilities of this already proven resource, but at the cost of undesirable motions caused by wind and wave forces. Given the need for floating platforms in deep sea applications, motion suppression techniques have been discussed to minimize this effect. This work presents the concept and model for a flywheel mechanism to be used suppressing pitch motion. The physical principle for the concept and a modelling strategy based on Lagrangian mechanics is presented and discussed in a case study that confirms the workings of the proposed concept. The Lagrangian approach enables the description of the system dynamics while having the system parameters, such as dimensions and masses, as constants. Once the equations of motion are obtained, a number of parametric analysis were performed in the case study to evaluate the impact of both the platform and the flywheel parameters on the system dynamics. The results indicate that each parameter impacts the system dynamics in different amounts and numerical results for all cases could be obtained with the proposed methodology.