Floating Wind Turbine Challenge

On June 23 and 24 2011, 25 international PhD students and young researchers of the international offshore wind industry gathered at the floating wind turbine challenge, organized by the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN) and the International Network on Offshore Renewable Energy (INORE). At this event, seven teams developed a floating structure for a 1/100 scale wind turbine in only 24 hours. The models were then tested in MARIN's Shallow Water Basin as visitors from the 31st International Conference on Ocean, Offshore and Arctic Engineering (OMAE2011) looked on (Fig. 1). Each team had been provided with the same limited amount of basic materials to build a floater for the wind turbine. The participants designed and built the floater by themselves. The concepts were tested in extreme waves up to 10m full scale, for more than two hours. This challenge is a demonstration that successful team work can lead to working innovative solutions: the seven floaters were stable and all of them had survived the full test campaign. As every challenge needs a winner, the organizing team looked at the lowest horizontal acceleration at the nacelle and the lowest weight to make a ranking. A summary of the floating wind turbine challenge is given in this paper. The paper presents the seven concepts that have been tested during this challenge and it gives the final ranking. It also illustrates the role of INORE in creating a community of offshore renewable researchers through the example of the Floating Wind Turbine Challenge.