FloatStep

The European offshore wind capacity is expected to double from 15.8 GW in 2017 to 25 GW in 2020 [1], and floating wind energy is currently in transition from single demonstration projects to industrialized utilization. The existing demonstrator projects have broadly followed the same development path of floater design, physical model testing, site-specific design, fabrication and installation. The technology is thereby at TRL 5 where the breakthrough into an industrialized business (TRL7) is still to be achieved. Denmark has the potential to become market leader in floating wind. The barriers for this are the limited fullscale experience and limited certainty in the above design steps. FloatStep provides scientific and technological answers to the existing gaps in the.TRL and value chains. The project is strongly linked to the pioneering Danish TetraSpar floater (Figure 3), where a demonstration project is planned for installation by the end of 2018. FloatStep applies the TetraSpar floater as an example concept throughout and thus provides specific knowledge for the further lift of TetraSpar from TRL 5 to TRL 6-7. At the same time the research extends the knowledge base for the Danish Wind Industry and thus enables a broader opening of the market for Danish enterprises. The development undertaken in FloatStep to support the TRL transition consists of tools for optimized floater and tower design that include the dynamic effects of mooring and control dynamics; new Engineering methods for the excitation of low-freqency platform modes and flexible motion of the large-scale floaters; and CFD methods for computation of the installation process. The installation process is further de-risked by dedicated phyiscal model tests at DHI. Finally, data from the full-scale demonstration floating wind turbine are analysed by Siemens-Gamesa, Stiesdal Offshore Technologies (SOT) and DTU to close the loop from up-scaling of physical model tests to full-scale design.