The eight selected Innovation Partners are:
- 2H Offshore
- AMOG / sowento consortium
- Delta Wind Partners
- First Airborne
- Fugro
- Lir – National Ocean Test Facility, Ireland
- PRINCIPIA
- TIDE Research Hub, Australia
These represent a diverse range of academic and commercial partners who are hoping to push some boundaries with their novel approaches.
The shareholders of the pioneering TetraSpar Demonstrator floating wind project, Shell, TEPCO Renewable Power, RWE and Stiesdal Offshore launched the Innovation Challenge with the aim of identifying innovative solutions for floating wind.
Going forward, in collaboration, and subject to final legal agreement, the TetraSpar owners are looking forward to advancing the offshore wind energy sector with these innovators.
The challenge winners will be able to use “real-world” data from the TetraSpar Demonstrator floating wind project that has been successfully operating at the METCentre test site in Norway since December 2021.
The climate is changing at a worryingly fast rate, and we see a good opportunity for the winning solutions to contribute to the advancement of floating offshore wind, making it a cost-effective and sustainable energy solution for a wide range of coastal economies.
We cannot wait to see what bright minds out there can come up with!
About the selected Innovation Partners and their plans:
2H Offshore: 2H Offshore delivers industry-leading advanced systems engineering for the offshore energy sectors. They are their client’s most trusted, independent partner; combining an unrivalled domain knowledge with leading edge technology to help realise their most challenging engineering projects.
With TetraSpar 2H Offshore plan to further develop and test their Physics Based Structural Digital Twin for real time monitoring of floating wind. Machine learning technology coupled with a Finite Element Analysis [FEA] model is used to build a digital replica of an existing floating wind platform with embedded pretrained algorithms. The calculated structural loads from the digital twin are validated by comparing them to the physical sensors at TetraSpar developing an effective and proactive way of identifying integrity issues ahead of time.
Consortium of AMOG Consulting and sowento: AMOG Consulting has been engineering innovative solutions to its client's complex technical challenges for over 30 years in the offshore energy sector. Based on its diverse experience and technical excellence AMOG is uniquely qualify to embrace the new challenges that the offshore marine renewables sector bring. sowento is an engineering consultancy and technology advisor, with its main business fields in lidar technology and floating wind as well as control applications. sowento is a spin-off from the University of Stuttgart and provides modelling, simulation and control solutions to various stakeholders within the wind energy industry.
With TetraSpar the consortium of AMOG and sowento plan to develop and test a modular and holistic monitoring solution for floating wind turbines. The solution brings together two field-proven products: a) sowento’s Simplified Low-Order Wind Turbine (SLOW) model, which is a fully coupled, non-linear, reduced-order, physics-based (aero-hydro-servo-elastic) model of a floating offshore wind turbine. b) AMOG’s Smart Mooring Integrity Checker (SMIC), an advanced integrity monitoring software for floating assets including real-time alerting, reporting and dashboard.
First Airborne: First Airborne transforms logistically intensive services rendered in the wind power industry into automated robotics-based services. Front and centre is their proprietary, validated, drone-mounted Windborne sensor, which provides wind turbine performance testing at exceptional scale and accuracy.
With TetraSpar First Airborne will use their drone based “Flying Wind Mast” to enabling tailored, direct measurement of the prevalent wind resource which in the case of floating turbines is an excellent independent measurement method entirely unaffected by the movement of the platform and sea.
Fugro: Fugro is a world leading Geo-data specialist, collecting and analysing comprehensive information about the Earth and the structures built upon it. They supports renewable energy projects around the world, throughout the complete life cycle, by providing the data and services needed for safe, sustainable, and efficient activities.
With TetraSpar Fugro will test a low-cost monitoring system combined with a digital twin approach to provide a reliable long-term method for mooring integrity condition monitoring tailored for fleetwide use on upcoming commercial floating offshore wind projects.
Delta Wind Partners (DWP): Delta Wind Partners (DWP) are specialists within technical- and interface management, and guarantee hands-on experience from fixed-bottom offshore wind farms to floating demonstration pilot projects, as well as WTGs in general, will optimize and strengthen their client’s projects.
With TetraSpar DWP will test the HIPER [Heave, Inclination, Position, Elevation, Roll] independent digital sensor box that can be mounted on the TP/tower wall or in the nacelle and enable independent digital verification, live monitoring and data storage (even without grid connection) which will enhance the efficiency and minimize risk during critical project phases in floating wind from WTG integration to operation.
Lir – National Ocean Test Facility: Lir – National Ocean Test Facility (Ireland) provides world-class laboratory testing for offshore wind, wave and tidal energy devices. The facilities at Lir include four wave tanks that can replicate real ocean conditions and enable testing of various marine innovations, technologies and structures at different scales. As well as the ocean test infrastructure, Lir also offers a highly experienced team of researchers and operators.
With TetraSpar the Lir team will conduct a reverse engineered tank test, comparing Hydrodynamic performance results in the tank against actual results that have been measured since TetraSpar became operational. To all parties knowledge this has never been done previously and will form the basis of novel research into marine renewable energy (potentially feeding into a PhD project with University College Cork).
PRINCIPIA: PRINCIPIA is a world leading engineering company in the floating wind industry, having an exceptional track record of multi-disciplines, conceptual to detailed engineering projects. Developer and distributor of Deeplines Wind TM and DTAm TM commercial software, for the design and monitoring of floating wind turbines.
With TetraSpar Principia and their partner Phimeca, are planning on adapting and validating their digital twin based structural health monitoring software (DTAm commercial software) which can provide automatically and in real-time cumulated fatigue damage at any critical locations of a FOWT: mooring system, floater, dynamic cable and tower. This monitoring solution requires very few sensors located on the floating platform, providing a robust and cost-effective solution for future floating wind commercial farms.
TIDE Research Hub: TIDE Research Hub is a multi-disciplinary academic research team that is developing new science and technology through digital engineering – the creation, use and embedment of data in engineering – to optimise the management of offshore energy infrastructure.
With TetraSpar TIDE will use data-driven models and phase-resolved forecasting to assess the ability to achieve wave-by-wave forecasting – which can facilitate safe “floater-to-floater” transfer (e.g. of personnel), or in the future to potential support active control of floating wind.
