Bio-Inspired Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Foundations

With global climate change, our energy production has come under scrutiny. Deep water wind energy remains largely untapped despite availability of higher wind speeds, and therefore higher energy generation potential. Moving towards deeper waters requires the wind turbines to stand atop floating foundations. However, challenges remain to leapforward existing floating foundations to improve their stability, manufacturability, and fatigue durability. Therefore, this study explored bio-inspired designs of floating foundations to address these challenges. These included tree fractals, flower fractals, and honeycomb lattice structures. The stability and performance of these designs were tested in a tub of water with a box fan to simulate ocean and wind currents. The testing process aimed at evaluate the performance of bioinspired floating foundations (a) for stability: data from a multi-axis accelerometer, (b) for fatigue resilience: static load testing and (c) for ease of manufacturing: subjective analysis of the unit cells to assemble the overall floating foundation structure. From the experimental data, parameters in the areas of stability, redundancy, stiffness, isotropy, and load capacity for fatigue resilience were obtained to evaluate the multi-matrice performance. The optimal design can be selected based on a balanced consideration of multiple mechanical and wind energy production performance indicators.