Novel foundation for floating offshore wind

Project Description

The proposed work is a consequent next step in a series of orchestrated efforts to develop a novel foundation technology (namely, the “Flying Wing Anchor”) for floating wind turbines. The focus of the project is to develop a novel anchoring system (pending US patent) that optimizes the use of potential anchor energy to mobilize maximum pull-out capacity with the use of the minimum marine spread, thereby ensuring an optimized geometry. The proposed anchor design leads to substantial reduction in the cost of foundation for floating wind turbines while significantly facilitating the deployment requirements. A Flying Wing Anchor is a steel plate in the shape of an aerodynamically efficient winged aircraft. The anchor is installed using gravity from free fall through the water column and penetrates into the sea floor under its own weight in a vertical orientation. Once the anchor has reached its full penetration depth the line attached to the anchor is loaded so that the wing plate is buried deeper and eventually is reoriented to the horizontal. This innovation results in significantly reduced foundation weight and the installation energy is optimized using gravity forces. The field anchor trials that are the subject of this project will be conducted by the research group at University College Dublin and is built on the premise of a series of ongoing studies involving laboratory testing on the model scale anchor, soil element testing on the sediment samples, and numerical modelling performed by the research groups at UCD and the project partners in the UK and the US. The most recent of these investigations are a set of preliminary field scale anchor trials that will be conducted (in late November 2015) under the Marine Institute-funded project CV15024 “Novel Technology Anchor Trials for Renewable Energy”.