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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BW Ideol

Floatgen’s lifetime extended for another 5 years as its cumulated production surpassed 30 GWh

BW Ideol is pleased to announce that Floatgen's operations, originally scheduled for 5 years, are able to be extended for an additional 5 years. This announcement comes on the heels of Floatgen surpassing the 30 GWh electricity threshold, underscoring the robustness of BW Ideol's design.

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BW Ideol floating technology

BW Ideol teams up with ABP in Port Talbot on floating foundation industrialisation for the Celtic Sea

BW Ideol AS, a global leader in floating offshore wind, and Associated British Ports (ABP), the largest port operator in the UK, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to investigate the feasibility of serialised production of concrete substructures for floating offshore wind turbine foundations based on the BW Ideol design at ABP’s port of Port Talbot.

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Ardersier Damping Pool

Our new Ardersier Harbour serial fabrication video is out !

Following a year and half of feasibility studies carried out by our team of engineers, we're proud to demonstrate that we'll be able to deliver Damping Pool floaters equivalent to 1 GW per year at Ardersier Harbour.

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