Nass&Wind Industrie and Ifremer are collaborating on the ROTOR project, an innovative model to test offshore floating wind concepts during tank test campaigns.
“The ROTOR Project, supported by the Brittany region, is a step further for the collaboration between Nass&Wind Industrie and Ifremer, which has started in 2008 in the floating wind field. Our skills are complementary for this strong partnership”, said Dominique Le Roux , co-project manager and engineer at the Marine Structures Behavior laboratory of Ifremer center in Brittany, located in Brest.
The two parties are both bringing in their respective specialities to the project, with Nass & Wind having expertise in the field of wind turbine, naval architecture and control command system, and Ifremer being a specialist for tank test campaigns, hydrodynamic and aerodynamic assessments, mechanical and electronic engineering as well as instrumentation.
By the end of 2017, Nass&Wind Industrie and Ifremer will have at their disposal a tank test model able to test, optimize and certify any offshore floating wind concept with HAWT (Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine). This model, developed with strong methodologies and innovative technological enhancements, will have the capacity and modularity to test any kind of floater type and control command strategy for a wind turbine range between 6 and 10 megawatts.
A full reduced scale model, with a rotor diameter around 3 meters, will be designed, built and tested during a tank test campaign at the Ifremer center in Brest in October 2017. This model will consist in a modular floater with a nacelle equipped to test power and speed regulation by integrating control command strategy from the wind turbine manufacturers. Each blade will be designed with an individual pitch control system.
“Complex coupled behaviors between structure and wind turbine combined with wind and wave impact will be tested at a small scale and will allow us to validate control command strategies”, said Cyril Bourgoin , project manager for Nass&Wind Industrie.
This model will be equipped with a full set of sensors. Data acquisition will give tremendous information for numerical models which are used in designing and optimizing full-scaled offshore floating wind concept.