Project description
Making tidal energy more competitive
Offshore wind and tidal energy are very promising renewable sources of power, with much potential to deliver European competitiveness in the green economy. The necessary preventive maintenance of steel installations exposed to the harsh open sea environment has a large effect on their costs. The substitution of steel by fibre reinforced polymers (FRP) can offer relevant advantages due to the convenient immunity to corrosion and superior fatigue performance. However, different technology gaps have to be filled to demonstrate the full feasibility of using FRP materials in the offshore industry. The EU-funded FIBREGY project will develop and qualify cutting-edge FRP materials, design, building and maintenance solutions for the structure and components of large tidal and offshore wind power platforms.
Objective
There is no doubt that the offshore renewable energy exploitation has a great potential to grow, and it will greatly help reach climate goals and CO2 reduction levels and are likely to secure Europe’s technical and economic competitiveness. However, the open sea is a very aggressive environment with may largely affect the maintenance costs of the installations and therefore the overall cost of offshore energy generation. The owners of offshore assets are well aware of that and are paying a steep price. A massive amount of steel goes into those assets, and all this metal is subject to degradation, which explains why corrosion accounts for approximately 60% of offshore maintenance cost. Preventive maintenance is not just expensive but also reduces the operating life of the assets. Despite the convenient immunity to corrosion of Fibre Reinforced Polymers (FRP), the use of those materials for large marine structures is limited to secondary components.
The main objective of the FIBREGY project is to enable the extensive use of FRP materials in the structure of the next generation of large Renewable Energy Offshore Platforms (REOPs) by overcoming the above mentioned challenges. In order to achieve this objective, the project will develop, qualify and audit innovative FRP materials for offshore applications, elaborate new design procedures and guidelines, generate efficient production, inspection and monitoring methodologies, and validate and demonstrate advanced software analysis tools. Clear performance indicators will be designed and applied in the evaluation of two existing REOPs concepts to be re-engineered in FRP in the project. Finally, the different technologies generated in FIBREGY will be demonstrated by using advanced simulation techniques and building a real-scale prototype to validate the materials, tools, solutions, procedures and guidelines to be developed in FIBREGY.
Fields of science
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- natural scienceschemical sciencespolymer sciences
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energywind power
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energyhydroelectricitymarine energytidal energy
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
08034 Barcelona
Spain