The ImproveFLOW project developed a software solution that aims to greatly improve the accuracy, security and efficiency of floating offshore wind analysis. The project was lead by DNV in partnership with Ceetron, COWI Norge, Equinor, Inocean and SINTEF Ocean - with funding from the Research Council of Norway for a project, and stated interest from MHI Vestas, Microsoft and Siemens Gamesa.
The main challenges that the project addressed were -
- Interaction effects in wind farms, including blockage and interline mooring arrays.
- Global response and strength assessment due to coupling between wind, wave, current and mooring forces.
- New interfaces and workflows for flexible and efficient set-up and execution of large numbers of massively parallelized cloud-based analyses.
- Verification and validation of analysis results against established benchmarks and tests on large-scale floating structures and turbines.
The result of he project will contribute to making floating offshore wind a more competitive source of energy by lowering the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) of floating wind energy through reduced uncertainty in the investment and planning phase, and improved accuracy, collaboration and efficiency in the design phase.
Improve FLOW fostered close collaboration between industrial partners (DNV, Equinor, Inocean, COWI, Ceetron) and research institutions (SINTEF Ocean). The project lead to competence building and cooperation between partners in the Norwegian offshore wind cluster, through joint workshops, shared documentation, presentation, and publications in scientific journals.
The project has contributed to dissemination of knowledge through various seminars and presentations (e.g., seminars and lectures arranged by NTNU and Sintef Ocean.), and collaboration with other projects (the EMULF and EMULF 2 project lead by COWI, the SFI Blues project lead by Sintef Ocean, etc.) This leads to shared knowledge about the physics and financials of offshore wind, which enables improved decision-making for investments and supports Norway’s ambition to lead in floating wind.
The concrete results from the project are knowledge, methods, computer tools and analysis workflows for coupled analysis of floating turbines and interaction between turbines in wind farms. When integrated into and implemented in commercial software, the project result will create faster and more accurate software solutions for floating offshore wind.
The partners are currently assessing the project results with regards to continued development of the methodologies and MVPs – with a goal to turn them into commercial software products and analysis services to the offshore wind industry.
Together, this will lead to reduced uncertainty in the investment and planning phase, improved accuracy and efficiency in the design phase and more predictable planning of maintenance and inspection in the operational phase - and thereby contribute to lowering the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) and make floating offshore wind a more competitive source of energy.
The underlying idea of this project is to make floating offshore wind a more competitive source of energy by lowering the LCoE through reduced uncertainty in the investment and planning phase, and improved accuracy, collaboration and efficiency in the design and engineering phase.
The major elements of the planned innovation are:
- Secure and efficient collaboration.
Developing methods for coupling various simulation tools, that effectively bring together the strength of substructure and wind turbine design tools in order to meet the unique coupled system challenges of floating wind that are not all included in the analyses of today.
- Accurate methods and tools.
Providing new knowledge about the importance of physical interaction effects that floating wind turbines are subjected to, and which are not represented in today's methods and tools.
- Efficient processes and tools.
Developing methods and tools for more efficient analyses and handling of the large amounts of data needed for exploring the desired design space of floating wind units and farms, which cannot be efficiently analysed with today’s tools and practises.
