Development, engineering, production and life-cycle management of improved FIBRE-based material solutions for structure and functional components of large offshore wind enerGY and tidal power platform

Project Information

FIBREGY

Grant agreement ID: 952966

DOI

10.3030/952966

Project closed

EC signature date 6 November 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 30 April 2024

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Advanced materials

Total cost

€ 8 056 482,50

EU contribution

€ 6 499 589,75

Coordinated by

CENTRE INTERNACIONAL DE METODES NUMERICS EN ENGINYERIA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - FIBREGY (Development, engineering, production and life-cycle management of improved FIBRE-based material solutions for structure and functional components of large offshore wind enerGY and tidal power platform)

Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2024-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Why is it important for society?
There is no doubt that the offshore renewable energy exploitation has a great potential to grow, and it will greatly help reaching CO2 reduction goals and is likely to secure Europe’s technical and economic competitiveness. However, the open sea is a very aggressive environment, which 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.

What is the problem/issue being addressed?
Despite the convenient immunity to corrosion of Fibre Reinforced Polymers (FRP), no offshore energy harvesting concepts have been thought to be built using those materials. This cannot be solely attributed to the youth of the industry. Without doubt, one of the main reasons is the lack of design guidelines. There are also different technology gaps that have to be filled to demonstrate the full feasibility of using FRP materials in the offshore industry.

What are the overall objectives?
In order to achieve the main objective, the project has developed, qualify and audit innovative FRP materials for offshore applications, elaborated new design procedures and guidelines, generated efficient production, inspection and monitoring methodologies, and validated and demonstrate advanced software analysis tools.
Conclusions of the action

Hence, 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 shortcomings of steel.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Overview of the results
Fibregy is a multidisciplinary project around the global objective of enabling the use of FRP for marine renewable energy applications. In order to achieve this objective, a number of works and milestones have been achieved towards different objectives:
Market update:
- Carry out a market and qualitative analyses of the benefits of FIBREGY solutions for the BLUE Economy
- Development of a global business plan.
- Development of an exploitation plan and exploitation agreement report
- Life cycle assessment analysis of the renewable energy marine platforms.
Material characterization:
- Analysis of the fatigue performance of composites.
- Development of stress and degradation models for composite materials.
Engineering solutions:
- Development of a catalogue for materials and connection techniques selection.
- Development of a Servo-Aero-Hydro-Elastic numerical framework for multi-wind turbines floating platforms.
- Development of a digital twin for structural health monitoring.
Guidelines:
- Development of project guidelines for design and assessment of large FRP-based offshore wind platforms
- Development of guidance notes for the production of large FRP OWTPs
- Development of Guidelines for recycling and waste managing.
Demonstrators:
- Design of the manufacturing and production processes of the REOP demonstrators
- Redesign in FRP two targeted REOP concepts
- Construction and installation of two FRP towers for the W2Power platform.
- Construction of the Tidetec’s turnable turbine housing demonstrator
- Construction of the real scale demonstrator of a W2Power module

Dissemination
WP7: Dissemination and exploitation
Fibregy has organized three open-door industrial days (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, La Ciotat and Madrid) with seminars on Fibregy progress and industry tours. Has been represented in over 30 conferences, 8 articles in specialized press, and 11 articles in research journals

Exploitation plan
WP 1: Market attractiveness, cost-benefit analysis and business plan
A market and qualitative/ Cost-benefit analyses have been performed showing quantitative evidence of the advantages of FIBREGY results beyond the state of the art in the offshore wind sector based on the results of technical activities. Al Fibregy has showcased a noteworthy reduction of maintenance costs when using FRP materials for tidal turbines. And a business plan has been developed with the following outcomes: Identification and description of market niches; description of the value proposition of the project for each market niche; cost and benefits of FRP-based solutions; Business Model Canvas for each different market. Insight of the financial approach to each of the markets in terms of revenues and financial profitability.
WP7: Dissemination and exploitation
An exploitation plan and exploitation agreement report have been generated. The aim is to define and detail the strategy for exploiting the project results. This report contains the routes and the specific measures that the consortium partners will take to ensure the successful exploitation of the results. In order to reach this the following activities were addressed.
1. Categorization of the project results and selection of those with a higher market potential.
2. Identification of the role of each partner and stakeholder in the exploitation of jointly owned key exploitable results (KERs).
3. Drafting the route to market of the KERs and the exploitation plan that partners will undertake.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Results beyond state of the art
Nowadays there is a lack of information or experience of the industry with regards to: design/ assessment guidelines for large offshore FRP structures; the design of large FRP-based offshore platforms’ structure; and the no experience in the production of large FRP-based offshore platforms.

Fibregy has overcome this lack of information and/or experience by:
• Generating New Project Guidelines for the Design of Offshore Floating Platform using FRP;
• Re-engineering the W2Power platform and Tidetec’s turbine using FRP materials
• Building medium and large scale demonstrators.

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