The growing global demand for green energy requires the development of innovative solutions. Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) present significant potential by enabling the harvesting of wind in deep-sea waters. However, as this technology is still in its early stages, the impact of the added six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) motion on wake dynamics and power performance remains unclear. Understanding these effects is critical for the design of floating wind farms. In this work, large eddy simulations and an actuator line model are employed to investigate the wake behavior and power output of the IEA-15MW reference turbine mounted on several floating platform concepts. To explore wake interactions in wind farm scenarios, two tandem FOWTs are modelled. The simulations are carried out in AMR-Wind, coupled with OpenFAST for the platform and blades' motion.
Initial cases are conducted with a laminar inflow to isolate fundamental wake mechanisms. Then, a neutral atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) is recreated to perform investigations with realistic offshore conditions.
Platform motions are found to induce velocity fluctuations in the wake and promote vortex-pairing. High-frequency and large-amplitude motions particularly enhance wake recovery in the upstream wake, although this effect is less pronounced in the downstream wake. Among all 6-DOF, surge is identified as the main driver of wake dynamics.
FOWTs generate larger turbulence levels than their fixed counterparts during laminar inflow. Notably, when the downstream turbine moves in phase with the incoming wake, the resulting interaction leads to the superimposition of the wake structures, forming large, separated low-speed regions.
In contrast, under turbulent conditions, FOWTs generate lower turbulence in the near wake, but similar levels further downstream. In these cases, the differences in mean wake velocity between floating and fixed turbines decrease significantly with distance.
The tandem FOWTs are found to produce less total power when operating at rated speed during neutral ABL conditions. However, the downstream FOWTs exhibit power gains of up to 20\%, indicating that larger floating wind farms are likely to generate more electricity than traditional bottom-fixed offshore wind farms.

Large scale wind farms consisting with floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) will be a solution for offshore wind energy industry to access more wind resources. However, wake structures and wake interactions of FOWTs subject to motions are still not yet been fully understand, especially when they are under turbulent inflow conditions with realistic turbulent intensities. These will be critical for designing floating offshore wind farms. Note that the majority of previous research are conducted with single rotor using models having relatively low fidelities and/or focusing on laminar inflow conditions. To advance the knowledge about wake and wake interactions of FOWTs, numerical studies about rotors of FOWT with prescribed harmonic surging motions are conducted in this thesis project with high fidelity CFD models, namely large eddy simulation (LES) coupled with actuator line model (ALM). Cases with single rotor without controller, dual rotors in tandem without controller, and dual rotors in tandem with controller are simulated with various of settings, including different surging settings and different inflow turbulence intensities.

For the cases with single rotor without controller, it is found that the differences of wake structures between fixed and surging rotors are pronounced when under laminar inflow conditions, where the periodic structures related to the harmonic surging motions can be detected straightforwardly; while the differences are much less significant when under inflow conditions with realistic turbulence intensities, and the periodic structures are clearly revealed only after phase-locked averaging. Moreover, surging cases with laminar inflow conditions have wake recovery rates which are significantly higher than the fixed case with laminar inflow; however, with turbulent inflow, wake recovery rates for surging cases are only slightly higher than the fixed case.

For the cases with dual rotors without controller, it is found that the wake interaction modes between the two rotors are significantly affected by the surging settings for the laminar cases, while the turbulent cases are insensitive. However, the power performances of the downstream rotors will be increased slightly with surging upstream rotors for the turbulent cases.

For the cases with dual rotors with controller, it is found that the implemented simple controller cannot improve the performances of the rotors as designed due to the large rotational inertia, and thus the modes of wake interactions are not altered a lot. However, the downstream rotors' operational parameters were successfully changed to more desirable values by the controller, demonstrating the controller's potential for numerical analysis of wake interactions between wind turbine rotors.

The findings of this effort demonstrates that the wake structures due to the surging motions of FOWT rotors will be smeared out by the ambient turbulence; and to achieve better power performances, more advanced controlling strategies may have to be implemented for FOWTs subject to surging motions.

Measurement campaigns and CFD simulations have recently identified a large-scale flow phenomenon called wind-farm flow blockage. This is found to bear a significant and far-reaching reduction in wind speed upstream of a wind farm. The wind farm blockage is attributed to the cumulative induction effects of multiple wind turbines placed in series. Wind-farm flow blockage has important consequences on energy production because it reduces the available kinetic energy in the incoming wind flow. In turn, this causes leading wind turbines in a wind farm to produce less energy than they each would in isolation. To date, the physics of this global blockage effect is not entirely understood, and they are therefore an active research topic. Due to the increasing demand for wind energy, reducing annual energy production (AEP) uncertainties and power production bias seems to be a challenge for wind energy researchers. Understanding wind farm blockage in complex terrain becomes crucial to account for uncertainties and power production bias.
This thesis set out to perform Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations to assess the impact of wind-farm flow blockage in complex terrain using the open-source software OpenFOAM. A laterally infinite row of turbines is simulated on top of a 2-D hill defined by the mathematical curve ’Witch of Agnesi’. The set of simulations is performed for varying atmospheric conditions: truly neutral and stable free atmospheric conditions. Thermal stratification imposed under stable conditions is of particular interest due to the excitation of atmospheric gravity waves (AGWs) by the turbine array and the topology. The velocity fields due to the presence of the turbine array on top of the hill are compared to the ones without. The resulting flow reduction is then compared to the cases without the hill in order to assess the impact of complex terrain on wind farm blockage. A series of sensitivity analyses are performed for varying inter-array spacing and hill size variations in order to further the understanding of wind farm blockage.
The results obtained in this study show that the magnitude of wind farm blockage is amplified due to the presence of the hill. Additionally, the excitation of AGWs is seen to have a major impact on the wind farm blockage due to alterations caused to the pressure field. The impact of blockage is seen to be dominant up to at least 10-15 turbine diameters upstream of the turbine array under truly neutral conditions. While the effects are more pronounced and much more dominant under stable free atmosphere conditions. All the stable free atmosphere cases simulated show a reduction ranging from 1-4% at different upstream locations while neutral cases show slightly lower yet non-negligible reduction due to blockage.
This study ultimately concludes that the existing ’wakes-only’ approach for estimating energy losses still has a significant power production bias. Therefore accounting for the blockage effects in the farm upstream is also equally important and must be analysed before commissioning a wind farm.