EDF, France Energies Marines, SBM Offshore and other partners are gathering results of a project to test offshore maintenance techniques for future floating wind farms.
The FLOWTOM consortium project was launched in 2021 to help develop solutions and since September 2022, the FLOWTOM partners have been cooperating with WindSpider to assess their solution for offshore maintenance on two different floater types.
In future floating wind farms will be far from the coast and economic and technical reasons, it may not be feasible to bring the wind turbines back to the port for maintenance and repairs.
This requires reliable solutions for heavy maintenance operations at sea, such as replacing a major component of the rotor-nacelle assembly.
One of the difficulties with heavy maintenance operations at sea is the depth of water at the sites targeted, which exceeds the capacity of the self-elevating platforms in use.
Solutions adapted to floating platforms and to meet the challenges of heavy lifting at height involving bigger turbines will be needed.
Initially a maintenance vessel and a 15MW wind turbine, on a mounted as well as a semi-submersible floater or a tension leg platform, were digitally modelled to define the operating conditions for heavy lifting at sea, both from the vessel and the lifts system.
To improve the reliability of the results obtained from this modelling, tests have been carried out using 1:50 scale models in a wave tank at the Ifremer Centre in Brittany during April.
The data acquired during the trials will be used to produce a digital twin representing what is happening in the wave tank, which in turn will be used to calibrate a global model.
This will reduce the margin of error in the modelling results and make the associated recommendations more reliable.