The MooringSense consortium demonstrates the project’s technologies to half a hundred international experts

MooringSense has just started its last month of implementation with incredibly positive results. The consortium has already validated the functioning of the new technologies developed within the project and foresees a remarkably promising conclusion to the initiative. This was said during the third workshop organised by the consortium, where the partners demonstrated the facilitating tools of the initiative.

The workshop was held online under the title “MooringSense Project – Demonstration of Key Enabling Technologies”, with the main objective of demonstrating the technologies developed within the initiative and their capacity and effectiveness in optimising the maintenance of floating wind turbine platforms. The meeting was very well received. Attendance was high, with almost fifty experts in the sector from 21 international organisations. The European Commission’s Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA) also attended through the Project Officer, in charge of assessing the progress of the project.

The European MooringSense project aims to reduce the operating costs of floating wind turbines by up to 10-15% and increase energy efficiency by 2-3%. To achieve this, since the launch of the initiative in 2019, the consortium has been working on the development of a mooring system integrity management and control strategy based on monitoring technologies.

In this regard, the partners have developed several innovative technologies, which will be implemented comprehensively to achieve the objectives: a smart sensor for monitoring the movement of the platform, a digital twin model of the platform system to monitor the remaining lifetime of the mooring system, structural health monitoring techniques and advanced control strategies for the behaviour of the floating wind platform used as a reference.

These solutions have been validated in several environments with promising results. The combination of these solutions will allow developing more efficient operation and maintenance strategies, plus optimised control of the remaining life of the structures.

The European project consortium is currently immersed in the last implementation phase, studying and assessing all the results obtained and the effectiveness of the control and management strategy, which brings together all the technologies developed.

MooringSense is supported by the Horizon 2020 call for proposals with funding of €4.2 million. The consortium of the initiative comprises the CTC Technology Centre, the leader of the project, TNO, Ikerlan, Sintef Ocean, Zunibal, Saitec, Bridon Bekaert Wire Rope Industry, Vicinay Marine Innovation and Intecsea.