Widespread use of floating wind turbines for power generation will require significant reductions in cost and environmental impact.  The complexity of coupled analysis and few full-scale projects has led to difficulties in determining the most effective designs. Multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) techniques can be applied to this problem and efficiently explore the design space despite the coupling inherent in a linear aero-hydro-servo-elastic model of a floating wind turbine.

This work seeks to develop generic MDO techniques and make use of gradient-based optimization methods to quickly find optimal designs.  Furthermore, novel objective functions are sought that consider the impacts of floating wind turbines on their surrounding environment. The optimal designs found, and broader exploration of the design space, can be used to guide future floating wind turbine designs.