MS#08.5 Hybrid testing for floating wind

F. TARUFFI¹, A. VIRé¹, S. GILLMEIER², M. NIJENHUIS³
¹ Delft University of Technology|² Eindhoven University of Technology|³ University of Twente

Floating wind special features

In the urgency of accelerating the energy transition, floating offshore renewable technologies, particularly floating wind turbines, play a key role. Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) can be placed further away from shore, exploiting large amounts of wind resources inaccessible to traditional turbines, and they will be a game changer for large-scale offshore electricity or hydrogen production.

A key challenge associated with their development is that the technologies strongly interact with their physical and biological environments in complex nonlinear ways. It is, therefore, difficult to accurately and fully integrate knowledge from different fields, in labs where scaling laws for the different physics do not match and where all the disciplines, from system dynamics to grid integration, are not present in a single facility. This leads to a suboptimal and iterative design of technologies and a possible mismatch between lab- and full-scale conditions with the inability to reproduce reality in the lab. Both lead to more design iterations, longer development times, and full-scale technologies that are more prone to failure.

Hybrid testing can overcome these challenges. It consists of physically testing a small-scale version of a component of the system and emulating the effect of the missing components through actuators driven by numerical models. This so-called hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) technique can be applied across the system, from grid integration to component testing, with the idea of integrating disciplines better, faster and cheaper when testing renewable technologies.

Although hybrid testing has been identified as the most promising technique to perform experimental testing on systems subjected to multi-physics dynamic loads, it still suffers from large uncertainties compared to reality due to missing physics in the digital emulation of loads and in their coupling with the physical test. This is because the numerical models used in hybrid testing need to run in real-time reacting instantaneously to changes in the physical test, requiring linearised or simplified methods which may lead to uncertainties and inaccuracies in the prediction.

This mini-symposium, co-organized by TU Delft, TU Eindhoven and University of Twente, will explore hybrid testing’s potential and challenges in speeding up large-scale deployment by alleviating the need for full-scale demonstration. Discussion will see different hybrid testing approaches, such as the vision of the Dutch project HybridLabs (https://hybridlabs.tudelft.nl) – bridging the gap between lab- and full-scale by making facilities, simulators, and offshore demonstration sites learn from one another – along with contributions from other research groups and projects working on data-enhanced hybrid testing methodologies to boost floating wind energy.