The European Union's future goals on clean energy include ambitious targets for increasing the share of renewable energy sources in the energy mix, fostering innovation in clean technologies. These goals are outlined in initiatives such as the European Green Deal and the European Climate Law, which aim to accelerate the transition to a carbon-neutral economy by 2050. In today's energy landscape, the EU stands as a global leader in offshore energy development and aims at continuously shaping the future of renewable energy worldwide.
In recent decades, Europe has seen the development of offshore wind farms supported by monopiles, steel piles suitable only for shallow waters. However, the advancement of floating technology offers a solution for harnessing wind resources in deeper waters, expanding the potential of offshore wind energy beyond traditional bottom-fixed solutions. Floating wind farms hold particular promise for regions like the Mediterranean with narrow continental shelves, where wind resources are abundant but inaccessible to conventional installations.
SEAFLOWER contributes to the discussion on Europe's future energy supply by focusing on the geotechnical aspects of floating offshore wind turbines. Anchoring systems, which secure floating structures to the seabed, constitute a significant portion of the capital expenditure for large-scale wind farms, up to 30%. Optimizing anchoring solutions could lead to substantial cost savings. While various anchoring methods have been tested successfully to moor pre-commercial wind turbines, not all are suitable for real wind farms spanning wide areas with multiple turbines.
The objective of SEAFLOWER is to analyse the behaviour of different anchor foundations through a numerical investigation. The procedure make use of metamodelling techniques to emulate the response of finite element models able to represent the anchors’ performances. A metamodel is a surrogate numerical model that is able to encode the response of a complex and computational expensive FE model. Once built, the metamodel can be easily exploited for the design. The procedure developed by SEAFLOWER particularly suits cost analyses and pilot design activities. This would contribute towards overcoming the actual technical barriers to the deployment of offshore wind in deep waters.
