Research
The project will have three parallel initating themes during the first two years. The first to deal with research nto the physics and engineering of the offshore wind farm, the second to look more specifically at the wind turbine, building upon the lessons of Supergen Wind 1, and the third to address the technical barriers to the wind farm connection and associated grid capacity issues. In the third and fourth years of the project, the results of these three themes will feed into a fourth gathering theme, which will consider the wind farm as a power station loking at how the power station should be designed, operated and maintained for optimum reliability and what the overall economics will be.
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This theme will look at different areas in relation to the operation of the farm. The results of Phase 1 and other research project have highlighted a number of further areas of research for Phase 2:
- Offshore wind resource
- Wakes and aerodynamics
- Radar and the environment
- Optimisation of farm performance
- Multiple wake impacts on machines
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This theme will build on the work in Phase 1 to improve the reliability and performance of individual wind turbines, in areas of:
- Drive train dynamics
- Rotor-wind field interaction
- Turbine blade and tower materials
- Fault detection for a greater range of future wind turbine drive train configurations
- Subsea turbine foundation
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The objective of this theme is to reduce main technical barriers in offshore wind connection, which will be addressed by investigating, through computer modelling, four sub-objectives of the targeted technology:
- New offshore nacelle and substatin equipment arrangements
- Offshore control schemes
- Connection to shore
- Integration of energy storage
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This theme will bring together the results of the first three themes to consider the wind farm as a power station. The research of this theme is outlined as:
- Array performance
- Wind farm control
- Operation as a power station
- Integrated monitoring
- Operation research for the farm
- Integrated wind farm economics
- Connection
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