Session: New & Innovative Floating Designs I

Paper Number: 103000

103000 - Floatech - the Future of Floating Wind Turbines 

The FLOATECH project is a Research and Innovation Action funded by the European Union's H2020 programme aiming to increase the technical maturity and the cost competitiveness of floating offshore wind (FOW) energy. This is particularly important because, due to the limitations of available installation sites onshore, offshore wind is becoming crucial to ensure the further growth of the wind energy sector.

The project is implemented by a European consortium of 5 public research institutions with relevant skills in the field of offshore floating wind energy and 3 industrial partners, two of which have been involved in the most recent developments of floating wind systems.

The approach of FLOATECH can be broken down into three actions:

·         The development, implementation and validation of a user-friendly and efficient design engineering tool (named QBlade-Ocean) performing simulations of floating offshore wind turbines with an unseen combination of aerodynamic and hydrodynamic fidelity. The advanced modelling theories will lead to a reduction of the uncertainties in the design process and an increase of turbine efficiency.

·         The development of two innovative control techniques (i.e., Active Wave-based feed-forward Control and the Active Wake Mixing) for floating wind turbines and floaters, combining wave prediction and anticipation of induced platform motions. This is expected to improve the performance of each machine and to minimise wake effects in floating wind farms, leading to a net increase in the annual energy production of the farm.

·         The economic analysis of these concepts to demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively the impact of the developed technologies on the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of FOW technology

Presenting Author: Alessandro Bianchini University of Florence