The Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator has launched a new £2.4m project aiming to cut deep sea offshore wind costs by improving foundation design.
The three-year project, called Improved Fatigue Life of Welded Jacket Connections (JaCo), aims to cut the cost of offshore wind by optimising the design of jacket foundations through improved fatigue standards and validation of faster testing and fabrication methods. Jacket foundations are set to become a more dominant engineering solution for offshore wind, as monopile foundations are unlikely to be practical for many future offshore wind farms located in deeper water sites and with larger turbines.
The project will develop a better understanding of fatigue performance by testing full-size jacket nodes made from existing manual and novel automated welding processes. Coupled with improved standards it is estimated that a weight reduction of 10 percent can be achieved if the fatigue resistance (strength) is enhanced by 10-20% through optimised design.
DONG Energy, EnBW, Scottish Power Renewables, Statoil and Vattenfall are supporting the project together with funding from the Scottish Government and collaboration from the supply chain and research organisations. Belgian material research centre OCAS will run the fatigue tests.
Jan Matthiesen, director of offshore wind at the Carbon Trust commented: “With an increasing trend of larger turbines that will be installed in deeper waters, we will see a growth in the use of more economic jacket structures. We have launched this project to drive cost reductions by optimising such structures. In addition, this project will aim to demonstrate the performance of robotic welding, which will allow the supply chain to fabricate at industrial scale.”
Jan Pedersen, chief of specialist foundations for DONG Energy commented: “For larger water depths combined with the large WTGs (wind turbine generators) already on the market and the ones to come in the future the jacket foundation is one of the most cost efficient offshore wind foundation concepts. JaCo will help to further lower the cost of this foundation type by allowing fatigue life optimization of jacket nodes through derivation of fatigue design parameters for modern fabricated nodes.”
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