Floatech

FLOATECH is a project funded through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and focused on the development of floating offshore wind energy.

The project is coordinated by TU Berlin and implemented by 9 partners from 4 EU countries: five public research institutions with relevant skills in the field of offshore floating wind energy (TUB, ECN, TUD, Unifi, Seapower), three industrial partners involved in the most recent developments of floating wind systems (SAIPEM, BW Ideol, Next Ocean) and one partner specialized in the development of EU funded projects and their communication and dissemination activities (Euronovia).

FLOATECH aims at increasing the technical maturity and the cost competitiveness of floating offshore wind energy. This will be achieved by two types of actions:

• The development, implementation and validation of QBlade-Ocean, a user-friendly and efficient design engineering tool performing simulations of floating offshore wind turbines with unseen aerodynamic and hydrodynamic fidelity. The more 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 reduce the wake effects in floating wind farms, leading to a net increase in the annual energy production of the farm.

SEAPOWER leads one of the five Work Packages of the project (WP5: “LCOE and market value evaluation of proposed technologies and scale up”). The WP aims to develop a cost model for offshore wind turbines to estimate the effect of innovative control techniques on Levelized Cost Of Energy and also to investigate the market value impacts of technologies developed in the project.

SEAPOWER is also involved in other Work Packages of the project: WP2 (Performing numerical analyses using OpenFast), WP3 (Specifications of the experimental setup and data analysis, relative to FOWT test), WP4 (Design of a novel floater and a teeter hinge for a FOWT compliant) and WP6 (communication).