Economical Deep Offshore Wind Exploitation

ended

Offshore wind has long been identified as one of the most promising energy forms to improve the penetration of renewables in the European energy mix. Since most of offshore wind resources is available over deep waters at a considerable distance from the shore, it is inevitable that the campaign of the offshore wind exploitation would move from shallow waters to deep waters. As the conventional bottom-fixed offshore wind turbine is no longer economically viable over deep waters (>50m), the floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) seems to be an appealing alternative to harvest the ampler deep-water wind. FOWTs are, however, threaten by the hostile deep offshore environment, which would induce unacceptable tilt motions and drastic vibrations of the floating system. The undesirable loadings on the blades, tower, floating foundations and other components, results in mechanical failures and electrical faults of FOWTs, both of which could lead to operation interruptions and cause disastrous economic losses. Overcoming the difficulties of effectiveness, robustness, integration and multi-scalability of optimal control and fault diagnosis system of the FOWTs is precisely the topic of the proposal, which would actively contribute to the implementation of the Economical Deep Offshore Wind Exploitation (EDOWE) by introducing the concept of an innovative distributed multi-scale control and monitoring system. Delft University of Technology owns top-level expertise in wind turbine/farm control and distributed multi-scale applications. Its world-leading experimental facilities provide a solid foundation for hosting a systematic study on the control and monitoring strategies of the FOWTs. Moreover, secondment at Politecnico di Milano and collaborating with our industrial partner 2B Energy on the action help developing an advanced solution to economically harvest deep offshore wind, and thus contributing to achieve the renewables consumption goal set by European Union.