Study aims for deep water offshore wind viability

To this end, academics from Manchester Metropolitan University have been awarded £124,000 to develop computer models to test the best methods for stabilisation and control in an aggressive offshore environment.

Lead researcher Dr Ling Qian, Reader in Computational Fluid Dynamics at the Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Flow Analysis, said: “If you want to locate wind turbines far away from the shore at a water depth of more than 50m, a fixed-bottom turbine becomes a very expensive and challenging engineering project.

“So we need to develop a floating offshore wind turbine that works in water deeper than 50m, but that leaves the top-heavy turbines exposed to being buffeted by high winds and rough seas even if the buoyant support system is attached to mooring lines anchored to the sea floor.”

Based on code developed in-house, Dr Qian and colleagues will use Manchester Met’s high-performance computer cluster to run a computer simulation of waves interacting with a platform based on an existing design for floating support structures. Representative waves from the North Sea will be used in the computer simulation.