GROW-to-GO

Rocks barely sound interesting, yet they are essential for the stability of wind turbine foundations. After all, they are used to prevent the erosion of sand around the monopile. Currently, the installation process of the scour protection requires three steps. Therefore, the Optimising Pile Installation through Scour protection (OPIS) project is researching how to improve this process. The research is well underway, and its researchers are nothing but “optimistic”. Listen to the podcast with Ton Peters and Cihan Cengiz of Deltares and David de Jager of GROW. Find out more: https://grow-to-go.nl/202312-opis

Extreme conditions… in an extremely short timeframe The Tubular Pile Pull-out Testing (TPPT) project impressively manages to mimic the conditions at sea for open tubular piles used for the mooring of floating wind turbines. Jan Kenkhuis explains: “Can we use open tubular piles for anchoring large floating wind turbines to keep the floating wind turbines on location in a harsh environment? That’s what we are testing here. We are actually simulating at this moment a storm condition. A serious storm, because that’s what we design for. Calm weather days are not really a concern.” https://grow-to-go.nl/202308-tppt

One ring to install monopiles faster, cheaper, and more silently. You’d expect the fabrication of equipment for the installation of large monopiles for offshore wind turbines to occur in or near a harbour close to the North Sea. But, instead, Hein van Opstal, Charlotte van Verseveld and Rob Sprij, all working at GBM Works, can be found at the firm Kersten in Wanssum, Limburg, next to the Maas river. And not just on any day: they are here to see their jet-ring design become a reality today. A jet-ring is welded into a monopile section, which will later be part of a 13,4-meter-long monopile. And two of these monopiles will be extensively tested in an onshore test as part of the SIMOX project. Have a look at our web magazine at Shaken AND Strirred

Developing the ultimate weather atlas for rain and wind in the North Sea A meeting with Iratxe Gonzalez Aparicio and Harald van der Mijle Meijer at the beach near Bergen aan Zee in the Netherlands on a sunny January day in 2023. To talk about rain and wind in the North Sea. Why? Because the PROWESS project is investigating the relationship between rainfall at the North Sea and the observed damage to rotor blades in existing wind farms. Iratxe and Harald know quite well how raindrops can damage the blade if they collide with the blade at high speed, but a complete correlated dataset of rainfall on the one hand and wind speed and direction on the other is not available. In PROWESS, a precipitation atlas will be made for the Dutch part of the North Sea, and this will be compared with erosion data from existing wind farms. https://grow-to-go.nl/202302-prowess

Testing with piles in water and sand to understand the soil around monopiles. It sounds like a beautiful beach day: playing around with water and sand in an environment that cannot be taunted by rain. But doing so can result in more than just sandcastles. As the size of offshore wind turbines increases, monopiles get bigger as well. New installation technologies are currently being investigated, further developed, and tested in the SIMOX (Sustainable Installation of XXL Monopiles) R&D project. The aim is to enable the installation (and decommissioning) of future XXL monopiles in the North Sea sands. And all of this in a sustainable, cost-effective, societally, and environmentally acceptable manner. https://grow-to-go.nl/202211-Getting-to-the-bottom of things

More energy through dynamic control over the wind flow inside an offshore wind farm “Wind turbines love a steady, constant, homogenous wind flow pattern. A wind turbine extracts energy from the wind. The wind pattern it leaves behind, downwind, is rather messy and turbulent. This is called the wake. Suppose a second wind turbine captures the wind in the wake of the first one. In that case, it will generate much less energy: Because the energy content of the wind is already significantly reduced and because the turbulence reduces the turbine’s efficiency to capture this energy.” Says Jan-Willem van Wingerden, full professor at the Technical University of Delft, on Data Driven Control, Wind Turbine and Wind Farm Control. “We’ve developed a way to control the wind flow inside a wind farm and increase the combined energy yield of all turbines.” https://grow-to-go.nl/202209-the-next-airbender

Offshore wind and the winning tickets for the coming years “The offshore wind sector is entering a new phase requiring a massive manufacturing and installation scale-up. Building a subsidy-free offshore wind farm should not mean that the companies involved make losses. We have to be economically sustainable as an industry. Therefore, it is vital to innovate to reduce costs further.” Says Jan van der Tempel, Chairman of GROW. “Mind you, we have to build 1000 turbines annually to drive the global energy transition. To make this happen, we must speed up all processes and align the complete supply chain.” https://grow-to-go.nl/202207-lets-execute

Meet the team who loves spinning around monopiles. The monopile foundations of wind turbines are subject to repeated (cyclic) loading by wind and waves. These forces are transferred from the foundation to the supporting soil, in a way that may affect the stability of the whole system. As the longer-term impact of cyclic loads is not yet fully understood, monopiles still tend to be designed on the safe side. If we understood better this behaviour, we could improve the design of monopiles to obtain lower fabrication costs. Federico Pisanò (Delft University of Technology) and Maria Konstantinou (Deltares) explain how the Monopile Improved Design through Advanced cyclic Soil modelling project (MIDAS) is helping to achieve that. https://grow-to-go.nl/202205-midas

Improving wind measurements to optimise power performance. To gain the most power from the installed wind turbines offshore and onshore, they must operate at their absolute best. That's why the Sensor Assisted Wind farm Optimisation (SAWOP) project was initiated. Koen Hermans (TNO) and Jan Coelingh (Vattenfall) explain how SAWOP will help prove that nacelle LiDAR and spinner sensor technologies can optimise the power performance of wind turbines. https://grow-to-go.nl/202203-sawop

Innovations are needed if the offshore wind sector wants to install the huge foundations for the ever-larger wind turbines, as quickly and with as little noise as possible. Well, “The Gentle Driving of Piles (GDP) concept tends to just do that,” Andrei Metrikine (TU Delft) confidently states. “This is because GDP uses vibrations, in two directions, with different frequencies, one of those being significantly higher than used in the conventional vibratory driving.” Twist and shake it fast! | Grow To Go (grow-to-go.nl)

How to prevent damage to rotor blades Rotor blades are made of strong materials that look indestructible, yet they get damaged by water and that costs a lot of money. Harald van der Mijle Meijer (TNO), and Julie Teuwen (TU Delft), put on their rainboots to research how rain impacts the wind turbines’ rotor blades. The goal? To get more insight into how the damage of blades evolves and even better: how to prevent it.

How to combine the best features of all materials and put it together in large structures. Offshore wind support structures make a significant part in the total cost of an offshore wind turbine. They continuously need to cope with a wide range of forces from wind, waves and currents, over the full lifespan of the project. Marko Pavlović, assistant professor at TU Delft, and Maxim Segeren, managing director at Tree Composites, introduce an innovation that might reduce the production cost of such foundations by 25 to 50%. Even without a direct quotation of their inventors, these numbers already show that their wrapped composite joints can change the world of offshore wind for the better. Listen to their stories.

Steel does not “react that optimal” to these offshore conditions that cause degradation. The corrosion of monopiles, a threat to the future of offshore wind? Senior scientist Richard Pijpers and project manager Joke Luyten, both working at TNO, want to improve the design and optimise maintenance of monopiles. How? To get a better understanding of the degradation – caused by corrosion and fatigue – of the offshore wind structures. Listen to their stories.

Offshore wind installations might be a wonderful solution to a serious problem for humans, the underwater sea life is now negatively impacted instead. Linda Kemp, project manager at MARIN shows how bubbles can prevent wind turbine installation noise that harms sea life. This is, she stresses, a “really nice topic to work on”, and it’s especially “fascinating to do new things, with an aim to protect the sea life and to improve the sustainability of the ocean.” For more information go to: https://www.grow-to-go.nl

Offshore wind energy has gone through tremendous developments in recent years. Innovation was a key driver for its success. If offshore wind wants to make a lasting contribution to the energy transition, the sector must continue to innovate. David de Jager of GROW - a consortium with a joint research program in offshore wind - gives you in this podcast series an impression of the key research and innovations that will shape the future of offshore wind.