Two decades of floating offshore wind knowledge
Conference/JournalMARIN Report 137
Date31 Oct 2023
MARIN has been involved in floating wind turbines right from the start of their development and has seen models triple in size from 5MW to 15MW in just 10 years.
The first floating project MARIN participated in was ‘Drijfwind’ in 2003 but this was limited to testing only the floater without the wind turbine to determine the global floater response in waves and current.
Then in a pioneering initiative in 2011, MARIN developed a new, high quality wind generation machine for its Offshore Basin which also gave the opportunity to model the wind turbine during tests. This involved a new performance scaling method for the rotor, which greatly improved the quality of model testing.
The first floating project MARIN participated in was ‘Drijfwind’ in 2003 but this was limited to testing only the floater without the wind turbine to determine the global floater response in waves and current.
Then in a pioneering initiative in 2011, MARIN developed a new, high quality wind generation machine for its Offshore Basin which also gave the opportunity to model the wind turbine during tests. This involved a new performance scaling method for the rotor, which greatly improved the quality of model testing.
Contact
ErikJan de Ridder
Senior Project Manager/Teamleider
Atlantis programme
The new 15MW turbine was subsequently used to test different floating wind turbine concepts as part of a project within the Atlantis programme funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E). The consortium comprised KENT, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) and MARIN.
TLP hull and turbine in Wave Basin at 90-degree orientation
Tags
floating wind turbineoffshore wind