Floating wind research

waves, sea, ocean-3445011.jpg

Floating wind research is one of the key fields at Stuttgart Wind Energy (SWE). Frank Lemmer, the head of Floating Wind at sowento, was part of these research activities from the early beginnings. His work on reduced-order modeling, integrated design, and controller design for floating wind turbines was awarded in 2019 by the European Academy of Wind Energy. With sowento he continues his work on floating wind turbines on an industrial level.

A new way of designing floating wind turbines: Integrated design

Our tools for integrated analyses, control design and optimization allow for a design, adapted to the wind and wave environment, for a rejection of the loads and high damping and stability. We have already designed different controllers and implemented them for real-time testing on experimental models. The results have shown that integrated solutions offer the prospect of significant extreme and fatigue load reductions in operational conditions, especially of the tower and floater structure. The controllers we design do not require more than the standard sensors on an offshore wind turbines and the actuators do not need to be re-designed.

If you are interested in this research, please contact Frank.

The PhD thesis “Low-Order Modeling, Controller Design and Optimization of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines” by Frank Lemmer was awarded for the best European PhD thesis in 2019.

Tank testing and model verification

Our vast experience in the field of integrated design, optimization and control of floating solutions paves the road to reliable and cost-efficient concepts of the future. Our vision has been a lightweight floating platform built in a modular way to be adapted to various sites.

The photo was taken at the DTU-USTUTT-CENER Triple Spar test campaign at DHI in 2016

  • DTU Wind Energy
  • Danish Hydraulic Institute (DHI)
  • Paper: Yu, W., Lemmer, F., Bredmose, H., Borg, M., Pegalajar-Jurado, A., Mikkelsen, R. F., Azcona, J. (2017). The TripleSpar Campaign: Implementation and Test of a Blade Pitch Controller on a Scaled Floating Wind Turbine Model. In Energy Proceedia.
wave tank testing of floating wind turbine

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