Project concept

FLOATFARM will bring the technologies developed within FLOATECH to the next level of technological readiness, complementing them with a significant number of new concepts, innovations and methods, in order to make FOW enter a new phase of industrial maturity.

In addition, FLOATFARM will pay special attention towards decreasing the negative environmental impacts on marine life and to enhancing the public acceptability of FOW farms.

The project follows 4 objectives throughout its duration:

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Technology improvement


I) Turbine Rotor, Drivetrain and Control
- In FLOATFARM, we aim to advance the state of the art by designing and making available to the scientific community, a new open-access reference wind turbine featuring a low specific power rotor for offshore applications. We aim to advance wave control through demonstration on a new 1:7 scale 15 MW FOWT in an open offshore environment. Such a systematic technology assessment is unprecedented in FOW research. A key technology for this technique is radar wave sensing. This sensing method will be advanced by validating platform excitations against a real FOWT. This technology can be applied to make turbine platform access safer in unsafe sea states, allowing for more effective turbine-access planning.

II) Turbine Substructure - FLOATFARM aims to advance platform technology through the construction of a 1:7 scale 15 MW FOWT with an innovative adaptable semi-submersible platform which will be operated in a realistic marine environment. The ambition of FLOATFARM is to advance mooring technology by performing detailed analysis of the synthetic taut mooring line concept both numerically as well as experimentally in realistic conditions.

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System replicability and market vision

FLOATFARM will extend the active wake mixing concept to multi-turbine control strategies exploiting turbine synchronicity. This will be achieved by advancing, validating, and openly releasing high-order simulation tools necessary for multiple-turbine scale time-domain modelling, alongside the development of use-cases with international partners appropriate for various customers and market segments. In the future, this technology may be applied to different turbine architectures as well as different wake excitation methods. The concept of turbine synchronisation also has a range of applications to platform control, turbine access, and dynamic mooring.

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Large-scale development:
scaled FOWT-PV platform

The shared mooring concept will be extended by generating experimental results for a simplified two-turbine case in an advanced wave basin. The data from this experiment will be made publicly available for development of shared-mooring models which account for dynamics and aerodynamic loads, greatly advancing validation datasets crucial for the numerical demonstrations required for technology upscaling. In addition to this, both shared mooring and shared anchoring technologies will be demonstrated on a scaled MW FOWT in a realistic marine environment.

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Making FOW more sustainable: Environmental & socio-economic impacts

FLOATFARM aims to greatly advance acoustic and ecosystem modelling tools in order to evaluate these marine noise characteristics and their impacts on marine species and ecosystem functioning. For the first time, the influence of platform architecture will be tested in these tools allowing for platform optimisation to reduce marine noise pollution and their impacts on the marine ecosystem. These modelling tools will also contribute to evaluating the reef effect and mooring/anchoring impacts on marine habitats, greatly advancing the conceptualisation, design and construction of FOW farms in an inclusive and sustainable way.