FLOATECH WP3 Experimental Wave Database

FLOATECH is a Horizon 2020 project funded under the Energy programme (LC-SC3-RES-31-2020 - Offshore wind basic science and balance of plant). The consortium is coordinated by TU Berlin and implemented by 9 partners from 4 EU countries. The project runs from January 2021 to December 2023 and has received a budget of 4 Million € from the European Commission over these 3 years.

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 a user-friendly and efficient design engineering tool (named QBlade-Ocean) 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.

The Work Package 3 of FLOATECH focuses on the advanced feed-forward wave-based control strategies for floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs). This includes a prediction of the hydrodynamic force acting on the FOWT’s platform to mitigate the response of the structure while enhancing its performance.

The experimental work carried out in Centrale Nantes in the context of this work package contains three experimental campaigns, listed below:

    C1: Measurement of wave fields, used to perform a wave elevation prediction at the turbine’s position;

    C2: FOWT in operations, development and validation of the 1-component aerodynamic force actuator, including force feedback loop and control to reproduce accurately the target aerodynamic thrust. The considered FOWT is the DTU 10 MW wind turbine supported by a spar platform designed at Centrale Nantes (Arnal, 2020);

    C3: same FOWT in operations, including the feed-forward wave-based control with both a 1-component and a 6-component aerodynamic force actuators.

This database presents the results of the campaign C1 as well as the prediction of the free surface elevation acting on the FOWT’s platform.