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.
