EDF, France Energies Marines, SBM Offshore, and other partners are pooling their efforts to evaluate offshore maintenance techniques for future floating wind farms.
The FLOWTOM consortium project, initiated in 2021, aims to develop solutions for offshore maintenance. Since September 2022, the consortium has been working with WindSpider to assess their offshore maintenance solution on two different types of floaters.
As floating wind farms are expected to be located far from the coast, it may not be feasible to bring wind turbines back to port for maintenance and repairs due to economic and technical reasons. This necessitates reliable solutions for heavy maintenance operations at sea, such as replacing major components of the rotor-nacelle assembly.
One of the challenges with heavy maintenance operations at sea is the depth of water at the sites, which exceeds the capacity of current self-elevating platforms.
Solutions tailored to floating platforms and addressing the challenges of heavy lifting at height with larger turbines will be crucial.
Initially, a maintenance vessel and a 15MW wind turbine were digitally modeled on both a mounted and a semi-submersible floater or a tension leg platform to define operating conditions for heavy lifting at sea, both from the vessel and the lift system.
To enhance the reliability of the modeling results, tests using 1:50 scale models were conducted in a wave tank at the Ifremer Centre in Brittany during April.
The data from the trials will be used to create a digital twin representing the wave tank's conditions, which will then be used to calibrate a global model. This calibration will reduce the margin of error in the modeling results, making the associated recommendations more reliable.
