GROW-to-GO Grow to Go

Rocks barely sound interesting, yet they are essential for the stability of wind turbine foundations. After all, they are used to prevent the erosion of sand around the monopile. Currently, the installation process of the scour protection requires three steps. Therefore, the Optimising Pile Installation through Scour protection (OPIS) project is researching how to improve this process. The research is well underway, and its researchers are nothing but “optimistic”.

Listen to the podcast with Ton Peters and Cihan Cengiz of Deltares and David de Jager of GROW.

Find out more: https://grow-to-go.nl/202312-opis

Extreme conditions… in an extremely short timeframe

The Tubular Pile Pull-out Testing (TPPT) project impressively manages to mimic the conditions at sea for open tubular piles used for the mooring of floating wind turbines. Jan Kenkhuis explains: “Can we use open tubular piles for anchoring large floating wind turbines to keep the floating wind turbines on location in a harsh environment? That’s what we are testing here. We are actually simulating at this moment a storm condition. A serious storm, because that’s what we design for. Calm weather days are not really a concern.”

https://grow-to-go.nl/202308-tppt

One ring to install monopiles faster, cheaper, and more silently.

You’d expect the fabrication of equipment for the installation of large monopiles for offshore wind turbines to occur in or near a harbour close to the North Sea. But, instead, Hein van Opstal, Charlotte van Verseveld and Rob Sprij, all working at GBM Works, can be found at the firm Kersten in Wanssum, Limburg, next to the Maas river. And not just on any day: they are here to see their jet-ring design become a reality today. A jet-ring is welded into a monopile section, which will later be part of a 13,4-meter-long monopile. And two of these monopiles will be extensively tested in an onshore test as part of the SIMOX project.

Have a look at our web magazine at Shaken AND Strirred

Developing the ultimate weather atlas for rain and wind in the North Sea

A meeting with Iratxe Gonzalez Aparicio and Harald van der Mijle Meijer at the beach near Bergen aan Zee in the Netherlands on a sunny January day in 2023. To talk about rain and wind in the North Sea. Why? Because the PROWESS project is investigating the relationship between rainfall at the North Sea and the observed damage to rotor blades in existing wind farms. Iratxe and Harald know quite well how raindrops can damage the blade if they collide with the blade at high speed, but a complete correlated dataset of rainfall on the one hand and wind speed and direction on the other is not available. In PROWESS, a precipitation atlas will be made for the Dutch part of the North Sea, and this will be compared with erosion data from existing wind farms.

https://grow-to-go.nl/202302-prowess

Testing with piles in water and sand to understand the soil around monopiles.

It sounds like a beautiful beach day: playing around with water and sand in an environment that cannot be taunted by rain. But doing so can result in more than just sandcastles.

As the size of offshore wind turbines increases, monopiles get bigger as well. New installation technologies are currently being investigated, further developed, and tested in the SIMOX (Sustainable Installation of XXL Monopiles) R&D project. The aim is to enable the installation (and decommissioning) of future XXL monopiles in the North Sea sands. And all of this in a sustainable, cost-effective, societally, and environmentally acceptable manner.

https://grow-to-go.nl/202211-Getting-to-the-bottom of things

More energy through dynamic control over the wind flow inside an offshore wind farm
“Wind turbines love a steady, constant, homogenous wind flow pattern. A wind turbine extracts energy from the wind. The wind pattern it leaves behind, downwind, is rather messy and turbulent. This is called the wake. Suppose a second wind turbine captures the wind in the wake of the first one. In that case, it will generate much less energy: Because the energy content of the wind is already significantly reduced and because the turbulence reduces the turbine’s efficiency to capture this energy.” Says Jan-Willem van Wingerden, full professor at the Technical University of Delft, on Data Driven Control, Wind Turbine and Wind Farm Control. “We’ve developed a way to control the wind flow inside a wind farm and increase the combined energy yield of all turbines.”
https://grow-to-go.nl/202209-the-next-airbender