The expected outcomes of FLOATECH are summarized below. These will contribute to :
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an essential advancement of the knowledge of basic FOW science
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the improvement of high-fidelity engineering tools for the design of floating wind turbines and for the optimization of floating wind parks and two innovative technologies which are needed to improve the cost competitiveness of FOW.
FLOATECH will promote the scientific knowledge on FOW and will stimulate further European research and development activities in both academia and industry. Manufacturers, operator and suppliers of FOW will benefit from the results as they can increase their technological leadership and economical completeness. In particular research institutions, SMEs and suppliers will benefit from the availability of the new design tools as they will be made available as open source.
Credits- : BW-Ideol-&-V.Joncheray
OVERACHING RESEARCH AND INNOVATION OBJECTIVES
O1
Get a better insight on the physical phenomena taking place in a floating turbine, both in terms of aerodynamics and hydrodynamics
Through the advanced, fully-coupled design and simulation environment QBlade-Ocean for floating offshore wind turbines and floating structures, the undelaying physical phenomena are better resolved, e.g. turbine wakes and hydrodynamic loading. This engineering tool will be made available as open source to stimulate further studies.
New experimental testing methods will be introduced using software-in-the-loop, an ocean wave tank, a wind tunnel and a 2 MW wind turbine prototype (Floatgen). This experimental environment will allow a deeper understanding of the involved aerodynamics and hydromechanics and the assessment of the proposed innovations. Unique data sets will be made available for the scientific community for further research stimulation.
O2
Model and reduce the uncertainties in the design process by means of proposed simulation approach
In addion to being a user-friendly and efficient design engineering tool, QBlade-Ocean performs simulations of floating offshore turbines with a higher fidelity than the existing tools. This allows for much more accurate turbine and floater designs, e.g. 1% gain in aerodynamic accuracy prediction could result in a 10% gain in accuracy of predicted loads.
O3
Facilitate the assessment of new technological concepts, techniques and systems by high-computing resources and dedicated experiments
The experimental testing methods introduced in WP3 and WP4, are intended to allow the assessment of new technological concepts for floating offshore wind systems. In the framework of FLOATECH several lab facilities (ocean wave tank, wind tunnel), a lab scale model of the DTU 10MW wind turbine and a utility scale 2MW wind turbine (Floatgen) will be combined to a unique and efficient experimental test system for facilitating future studies.
Qblade-Ocean (WP1) will be optimized for high-perfomance computing (HPC) environments with massively parallelized computation and also for cloud computing.
O4
Increase the future market value of offshore wind energy
The combination of QBlade-Ocean (WP1) with the innovative feed-forward wave-based control for platform stabilization (WP3) and with the novel wake control techniques (WP4) allows the design of optimized floating offshore wind turbines and farms, such that wind.
O5
Reduce the LCOE by means of:
1) a performance increase of new machines thanks to the more advanced and predictive simulation tools;
2) innovative control techniques able to maximize the performance during the floating motion
The fully-coupled design and simulation environment QBlade-Ocean (WP1) allows for much more tailored turbine designs specifically for floating structures, leading to a reduction in CAPEX and OPEX and to an increase of turbine efficiency.
The new active feed-forward wave based control (WP3) increases the energy yield taking into account the floater motion. Furthermore, it results in the reduction in floater mass and fatigue loads.
With active wake-mixing control (WP4) future floating wind farm arrays can be designed in a more economic manner and with an increased AEP as the wind fields in the farms are less disturbed through the reduced size of the turbine’s wake.