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Minimisation of the offshore wind and tidal turbine acoustic footprint on marine life

Project description

Reducing offshore wind and tidal turbine damage

Renewable energy solutions play a crucial role in our efforts to combat climate change, as they provide substantial electricity generation while minimising environmental harm. Regrettably, recent studies indicate that certain types of renewable energy sources might have detrimental effects on the environment, particularly offshore wind and tidal turbines. Despite their general reputation for ecological friendliness, these turbines have the potential to negatively impact marine life through acoustic damage. In this context, the ERC-funded off-coustics project aims to synergise relevant physical data and numerical simulations. This endeavour seeks to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the acoustic repercussions and their underlying nature. This overall goal is to enable energy production without any adverse effects on the local marine ecosystem.

Objective

For renewable energies to be sustainable in the future, their impact and harmful effects on the environment should be minimum. Recent evidences suggest that offshore wind and tidal turbines can have an acoustic damaging impact on marine life, due to the sustained generation of noise, which propagates very efficiently underwater.

Off-coustics combines numerical simulations and experiments to provide insights into the physics governing the aero/hydro-acoustic generation and propagation for offshore wind and tidal farms. Control of these physics will enable the design of silent offshore farms enabling renewable energy with zero acoustic impact.

First, I propose to develop a novel aero/hydro-acoustic solver, blending advanced high order numerical techniques through machine learning and trained with experiments, to simulate flow-acoustic signatures for wind and tidal turbines, in realistic offshore environments (including bathymetry, air-water surface, etc.). Second, an experimental campaign will generate aero/hydro-acoustic data for scaled turbines and farms to help elucidate the physics governing offshore acoustics and to guide/validate the flow-acoustic simulator. Third, simulations and experiments will be combined to characterise turbines in complex offshore environments and to develop physic-informed surrogate models. Fourth, using the developed surrogate models and optimisation, Off-coustics will propose new designs of silent farms that minimise the acoustic impact while ensuring energy production.

Major advances in multidisciplinary aspects are expected, including fluid mechanics, numerical simulations, optimisation, experimental acoustics, aero/hydro-acoustics and offshore wind and tidal turbine physics.

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2022-COG

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Host institution

UNIVERSIDAD POLITECNICA DE MADRID
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 992 500,00
Address
CALLE RAMIRO DE MAEZTU 7 EDIFICIO RECTORADO
28040 MADRID
Spain

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Region
Comunidad de Madrid Comunidad de Madrid Madrid
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 992 500,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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