Wave basin tests to demonstrate an integrated floating breakwater and solar farm concept

AuthorsZanden, J. van der

Conference/JournalMARIN Report 139

Date29 Mar 2024

The Horizon Europe project SUREWAVE (2022-2025) aims to develop a floating solar farm for offshore
environments.

An existing design of interconnected photovoltaic (PV) modules is being integrated with an external floating breakwater in the EU project.The SUREWAVE consortium includes floating breakwater and PV developers, material and hydrodynamic specialists, and lifecycle assessment experts. MARIN’s contribution involves numerical simulations and basin tests to quantify and improve the system’s hydrodynamic behaviour.

Contact

Joep van der Zanden

Senior Project Manager

TESTS IN MARIN’s Concept Basin

A year into the project, an early-stage design was tested at 1:10 scale in MARIN’s Concept Basin. In order to ensure the same motion response at protype and model scale for all degrees of freedom, particular effort was put into the scaling of the elastic joints that interconnect the PV modules. In general, the geometry and inertial properties of the design are scaled from the prototype in wave basin tests. For the present floating PV system, scaling laws should also be applied to the elastic properties of the PV joints.

Floating PV model installed in the basin

The Horizon Europe project SUREWAVE aims to develop and test an innovative concept of Floating Photo-Voltaic (FPV) system, consisting of an external floating breakwater made of new circular materials that acts as a protection against severe wave loads on the FPV structure. Twelve months into the project, a preliminary version of the integrated design was tested at scale 1:10 in one of MARIN’s wave basins. An excellent opportunity for the consortium to learn about the design’s hydrodynamic performance in operational and harsh environments!

Motions of a 100-module floating PV system calculated using the wave diffraction solver DIFFRAC