Discover the people behind FLOATFARM in our interview series!
Meet Jan-Willem van Wingerden and Leendert Starink from TU Delft with 5 questions and answers about the project goals, challenges and expected impact.
Could you briefly present your organization and its role within FLOATFARM?
Jan-Willem and I are from the TU Delft, and more specifically, the Delft Center for Systems and Control. Our research group is specialized in the control of (floating) wind turbines and wind farms. With this experience, we contribute to FLOATFARM by advancing the state of the art control solutions for floating wind farms in WP3 by researching turbine repositioning, and by researching wave feedforward control as part of WP1.
Could you briefly explain the work done by TU Delft since the start of the project?
Since the start of the project the work of the TU Delft can be summarized into three parts;
- By researching turbine repositioning, a novel repositioning strategy was found. This strategy is dynamic repositioning, which allows turbine repositioning to be effective also for tauter mooring systems by dynamically yawing the turbines.
- For wave feedforward control, several data-driven methods have been explored, developed and validated in a high-fidelity simulation environment.
- To support data-driven wave feedforward control, a new data-driven method has been developed that is specifically well suited to obtain data-driven optimal controllers of low complexity, which allows an easy implementation of the technique
What do you expect to achieve in 2026?
In 2026 we expect to progress on the three topics mentioned above. More specifically:
- We expect a validation of the dynamic repositioning strategy in a high-fidelity simulation environment, by using QBlade and the wake model supplied to us by TUB. This will be presented in D3.2, and a paper which is in progress.
- For wave feedforward control, we expect to summarize our work into a paper. Furthermore, we hope to extend our data-driven techniques to tune gain-scheduled pitch controllers, which we are very excited about.
- We expect to demonstrate the newly developed data-driven technique with wave feedforward control.
From a research perspective, what’s the advantage of being part of a European project like FLOATFARM?
The cooperation between parties in the consortium is very nice. The collaboration between different parties, coming either from industry or academia, provides a wide variety of specialistic experience, which elevates the quality of our research.
Why have you decided to join the consortium?
The TU Delft was already part of the predecessor of FLOATFARM: FLOATECH. This was a great success, and hence it was a natural decision to join FLOATFARM.
