FLOATECH R&D project

FLOATECH is a Horizon 2020 project funded under the Energy programme. The consortium is coordinated by TU Berlin and implemented by 9 partners from 4 EU countries.

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.

BW Ideol is mainly involved in the experimental offshore testing and validation (WP3). In particular, we are responsible for installing a wave prediction system, including a X-band radar, on Floatgen in order to capture the evolution of wave field surrounding the FWT. We also supervise operations and collect onsite data over the course of the project.

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Launch of the Velella R&D project aiming at reducing the environmental impact of floating wind turbines

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