Gabriele Bedon Aeroelasticity Researcher Energy research Centre of the Netherlands
Wind Energy Unit
Westerduinweg 3 1755 LE Petten The Netherlands
bedon@ecn.nl www.ecn.nl
Offshore Airborne Wind Energy TKI Sea-Air-Farm Aerodynamic Performance,
Installation and Operation and Maintenance
Gabriele Bedon, Marco Caboni, Kisorthman Vimalakanthan, Novita Saraswati, Ashish Dewan, Gerard Schepers
Energy research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN)
High altitude wind maps suggest a great potential to supply a significant portion of energy needs. Airborne wind energy has a large potential not only because of the power density but also because regions with suffi-cient resources are widespread around the world. How-ever, there is no location over the land that can guarantee any power 95% of the time. ECN, Ampyx Power, Mocean-Offshore, and Marin are investigating the feasibility of off-shore airborne energy in the TKI Sea-Air-Farm project. This project aims to investigate, select and design tech-nical concepts for offshore application of Airborne Wind Energy Systems (AWES), combined into a conceptual de-sign of a 350 MW airborne wind farm which then, through a weight reduction, load reduction on the support struc-ture and lower costs for installation and O&M eventually leads to an overall LCoE, competitive to the costs of exist-ing offshore wind technology.
An aerodynamic review of the power-plane aerodynam-ics and power production is conducted by ECN. The tools developed and validated for wind turbines are adapted to perform a critical review of the performance. The air-foil properties, estimated from the open source tool SU2 [1], are compared to OpenFOAM estimations, obtaining a good agreement. These properties are afterward in-cluded in the ECN Aeromodule [2], a free wake vortex line
method to perform estimations of horizontal axis wind turbines. By providing the power-plane path, estimations of power production are obtained.
Moreover, ECN uses its validated tools to estimate the costs for installation, operation, and maintenance for the offshore airborne technology [3,4]. The current state-of-the-art strategies are adapted and compared in order to find the most suitable one for the power-plane case. To the authors’ knowledge, this represents the first attempt in literature to estimate these costs, which have a very im-portant impact on the cost of energy and on the final fea-sibility of this technology.
References:
[1] T. D. Economon, F. Palacios, S. R. Copeland, T. W. Lukaczyk, and J. J. Alonso, žSU2: An Open-Source Suite for Multiphysics Simulation and Design,ž AIAA J., vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 1ś19, 2015.
[2] K. Boorsma, F. Grasso, and J. G. Holierhoek, žEnhanced ap-proach for simulation of rotor aerodynamic loads,ž 2012. [3] A. Dewan, M. Asgarpour, and L. B. Savenije, žCommercial Proof of Innovative Installation Concepts using ECN Install,ž 2015. [4] T. S. Obdam, žSpecifications ECN O&M Access,ž Petten, the Netherlands, 2014.
