MaREI ORE Project of the Year at the MRIA Forum
Congratulations to MaREI’s Seán Leen and his team members Oisin Conway (Wood and University of Galway) and Aengus Connolly (Wood) who won the MaREI ORE Project of the Year award at the MRIA Forum for the project ‘Exploration and Validation of Numerical Software for Floating Offshore Wind Systems’.
The Marine Renewables Industry Association (MRIA) represents companies and interests in Ireland and Northern Ireland in the Marine Renewables Emerging Technologies (MRET) sector. The Marine Renewables Emerging Technologies, MRIA’s area of concern, include ocean energy and floating offshore wind energy as well as ‘hybrids’ (energy convertors which combine wave and floating wind devices).
Project Description:
The Offshore Code Comparison, Collaboration, Continued, with Correlation and unCertainty (OC6) is an international research project run under the International Energy Agency (IEA) Wind Technology Collaboration Programme (TCP) Task 30. The project focused on validating the tools used to design offshore wind systems. OC6 implemented a three-way validation process that compares both the engineering-level modelling tools and higher-fidelity tools to measurement data. This project, coordinated by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) was concerned with Phase IV, which examined numerical modelling of a novel floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) known as ‘TetraSpar’, a next-generation concept constructed by Stiesdal Offshore Technologies which aims to combine the best features of traditional spar and semi-submersible platforms, coupled with a modular design for ease of manufacturing and assembly. In this study, numerical modelling is achieved using a mid-fidelity tool which performs fully coupled aero-hydro-servo-elastic simulations in the time domain. The validation process involved 17 world-leading international participants (universities and industry experts) from 10 different countries, featuring comparative assessment of participant models against test data.
