In September 2022, the Consortium submitted its periodic mid-term report to the European Commission after one and a half years of collaborative work.
All Horizon 2020 projects are divided into reporting periods that enable the funding agency to monitor the project. FLOATECH reached the end of the first period on 30 June 2022, and after two months of drafting the periodic report, it has been sent to the European Commission for review. This progress report was followed by a meeting with the project officer of CINEA, the agency in charge of the project.
Some comments have been made by the evaluators to which the Consortium has responded and the project has now officially reached its first reporting period. The European Commission is satisfied with the implementation of the project and recognises "outstanding results with an immediate or potential significant impact for the period". The review report particularly highlighted the following results:
High order parallel fast wake calculations have been completed.
The open source wind turbine simulation tool QBlade has been extended to be able to account for Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) configurations with various modelling options (extension called QBlade-Ocean) and the linear potential solver NEMOH has been coupled to it.
QBlade-Ocean has been verified and validated in comparison to wave tank experiments.
The experimental setup aimed at validating the remote wave sensing device in offshore conditions has been completed.
Development and testing of the radar control software have been finalized as well as the design, installation and commissioning of the data acquisition and radar control system.
The work on the development and experimental validation of a new technology named Active wave based control (AWC) for FOWTs has started by using QBlade-Ocean and OpenFast software tools.
A thorough investigation on the fundamental physics behind wake mixing has been accomplished focusing on the effect of platform motion, control input, and atmospheric conditions on wake mixing.
The control and platform design of the novel floater has been started for active wake mixing.
In terms of dissemination and communication, the website of the project was established, two peer reviewed papers were published and the consortium participated in 3 scientific conferences with oral and poster presentations. The consortium also created a Zenodo site as an open repository and shared 3 public datasets.
The European Commission stressed that these results will advance the state of the art in design and simulation tools for offshore wind turbines.
The FLOATECH project is now in its second reporting period until the end of the project. All project partners are committed to achieve the final objectives of the project, in line with the recommendations made by the evaluators.
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