| Summary: |
The Earth Planet is roughly composed of 29% of land and 71% of water, where approximately 97.5% of the water corresponds to seas and oceans. Yet, seas and oceans are the planet's least explored resource. In 2010, the European Science Foundation's Marine Council projected that, by 2050, Europe will supply up to 50% of its electricity needs from marine renewable energy, more precisely from wind energy, wave energy, etc. Clearly, harnessing offshore renewable energy will present both opportunities and challenges for the
world and, in particular, for Portugal, as the Portuguese and Azores Sea comprises a significantly large area in Europe.
In a recent study, a group that included members on this proposal's research team outlined a procedure for the requalification of offshore platforms that had been originally designed for extracting natural gas in the Adriatic Sea. After the underground resource has been depleted, these fixed platforms (termed jacket platforms), often sited on sandy sea floors and with low water depths, can be extracted and moved to another location. The work of the research group proposed systematic ways to convert these platforms to be used as support structures for offshore wind turbines. Their proposal was detailed enough to allow efficient evaluation in the initial design phase and for tender design, even when limited metocean (meteorological and oceanographic) information was available for the planned site. The tool they developed was sufficiently detailed but simple to allow systematic structural analysis of the jacket structure and the retrofitted wind tower configuration. Customized offshore wind turbines can be, in this manner, selected with consideration for the wind resource as well as accounting for the available structural integrity including its age and remnant fatigue capacity.
Portugal is a leader in offshore wind energy proof-of-concept testing, including for new floating concepts. For instance, in 2011, a full-scale  |
Summary
The Earth Planet is roughly composed of 29% of land and 71% of water, where approximately 97.5% of the water corresponds to seas and oceans. Yet, seas and oceans are the planet's least explored resource. In 2010, the European Science Foundation's Marine Council projected that, by 2050, Europe will supply up to 50% of its electricity needs from marine renewable energy, more precisely from wind energy, wave energy, etc. Clearly, harnessing offshore renewable energy will present both opportunities and challenges for the
world and, in particular, for Portugal, as the Portuguese and Azores Sea comprises a significantly large area in Europe.
In a recent study, a group that included members on this proposal's research team outlined a procedure for the requalification of offshore platforms that had been originally designed for extracting natural gas in the Adriatic Sea. After the underground resource has been depleted, these fixed platforms (termed jacket platforms), often sited on sandy sea floors and with low water depths, can be extracted and moved to another location. The work of the research group proposed systematic ways to convert these platforms to be used as support structures for offshore wind turbines. Their proposal was detailed enough to allow efficient evaluation in the initial design phase and for tender design, even when limited metocean (meteorological and oceanographic) information was available for the planned site. The tool they developed was sufficiently detailed but simple to allow systematic structural analysis of the jacket structure and the retrofitted wind tower configuration. Customized offshore wind turbines can be, in this manner, selected with consideration for the wind resource as well as accounting for the available structural integrity including its age and remnant fatigue capacity.
Portugal is a leader in offshore wind energy proof-of-concept testing, including for new floating concepts. For instance, in 2011, a full-scale 2 MW floating wind turbine platform was deployed 5 km off the coast of Aguçadoura, Portugal. This platform was completely assembled onshore before it was towed 400 km along the Portuguese coast from its assembly facility in Setubal. To date, the system has produced in excess of 16 GWh of electricity, delivered by sub-sea cable, to the local grid. The IR (Dr. José António Correia) and his team at FEUP (CONSTRUCT & CIIMAR research group) have a wealth of experience in the domains of marine renewable energies, offshore, coastal and port engineering, as well as, design of offshore structures including fatigue analysis criteria.
The UT-Austin team will be led by Professor Lance Manuel, who has worked for many years, on problems related to the safety and reliability of fixed and floating offshore platforms, offshore wind turbines, and wave energy converters. His group's main thrust is directed toward better understanding the dynamics of offshore structures, and on uncertainty propagation from the environment through system response and to design. Prof. Manuel is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the ASME Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic
Engineering. UT-Austin's efforts in research related to the offshore oil and gas industry began in 1988 with funding from the National Science Foundation, which helped found the Offshore Technology Center (OTRC). This center, created to conduct basic engineering research and develop systems for the economical and reliable recovery of hydrocarbons at ocean depths of 3,000 feet or more, achieved a leadership role in cutting-edge research on critical elements of the deep-water production problem.
Together, the two teams will bring important synergies toward addressing the problem of how to safely and responsibly use or reuse existing sites and systems in place for future offshore wind energy generation.
The outlined SOS-WindEnergy project will involve the following tasks: I) Review of metocean data and fatigue approaches for offshore structures; II) Feasibility assessments of specific support structures and foundations using metocean data; III) Experimental fatigue evaluation of typical welded joints in offshore jacket platforms; IV) Fatigue performance evaluation of platforms for offshore wind using stochastic simulation; and V) Dissemination activities.
It is anticipated by the research team that this proposed work is intended as a pilot study for planned reliability analyses of decommissioned jacket platforms and consideration for their future use in wind energy generation in an offshore environment. The benefits to the environment are obvious; such reuse plans reduces waste and the intended future use also contributes to cleaner and more responsible energy generation and less harm to the environment. |