Recently, the exorbitant investments limit the commercial development of floating offshore wind farms, especially for the transportation and installation of floating substructures. In view of the considerable profits of fish farming and improving the economy of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs), an integrated floating structure consisting of a barge-type FOWT with an aquaculture cage is proposed in this study. The coupled analysis model of the integrated floating structure is established using the simulation tool AQWA to investigate its dynamic characteristics. In the analysis, it can be seen that the thrust force set by user-force with relative wind speed is more matching with the actual situation. The platform of barge-type FOWT with an aquaculture cage is a reasonable design, since the motion response meets safety specifications for various environmental load conditions encountered in practice. Moreover, it is noted that the mean value of the motion response varies mainly with the wind speed, while the standard deviation is mainly influenced by the wave height. And the presence of ocean currents is extremely important for analyzing the motion response of the barge-type FOWT with an aquaculture cage.
Developing wind power vigorously is a feasible means to reduce environmental pollution and traditional energy consumption. Many countries have focused on their wind power industry, especially in Europe. For example, the German government expects to install wind turbines of 200,000-250,000 kW by 2030 (Faber et al., 2006). Due to the abundance of offshore wind energy and the ability to reduce the impact of noise on humans, etc., it is more suitable for the development of the wind power industry in the sea. At present, the nearshore wind energy development has been completed, the future development of offshore wind turbines will certainly be from shallow to deep sea. Therefore, the floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) proposed by Heronemus (1972) has begun to attract more attention. With the advance of floating turbines, the main mainstream forms are now: spar-type (Jonkman, 2010), semi-submersible-type (Robertson et al., 2014; Zhao et al., 2021), tension leg type (Ren et al., 2022; Oguz et al., 2018), and barge-type platform (Ding et al., 2015). Each conceptual platform design has its characteristics. For example, spar-type platform has the advantages of excellent stability and simple structure; the features of the semi-submersible platform are easy installation and shallow draft; barge-type platform is characterized by its simplicity of manufacture (Chuang et al., 2021) and long service life. With the development of floating wind turbines, excellent structures have been designed by scholars in addition to the classic forms, such as the combined wind-wave energy converter (Wang et al., 2022).
