Consortium to develop mooring solutions for deepwater floaters

The consortium has entered contract negotiations for a US$850,000 grant from the National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium for the project, known as DeepFarm.

DeepFarm will help accelerate the deployment of deepwater floating offshore wind projects by investigating a range of innovative mooring system components, each contributing to the design of a new type of mooring system that can help reduce the levelized cost of energy (LCoE) of floating offshore wind.

DeepFarm will enhance open-source software tools for floating turbine design – including FAST.Farm and MoorDyn – to optimize the design of mooring system components while reducing lifecycle costs.

The project will also entail the development of an open-source mooring system design coupled with an LCoE assessment of shared-anchor layouts.

The accuracy of these open-source models will be bolstered through techno-economic feasibility studies of the utilized mooring hardware.

The consortium also includes Aker Solutions, American Bureau of Shipping, the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Scana Offshore, and the University of Massachusetts.