A consortium of partners led by Principle Power has been awarded a US$ 3.6 million grant from the U.S Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to develop, validate and operate Digifloat, the world’s first digital twin software tailored to floating offshore wind applications.
This digital twin model will be a real-time, high-fidelity numerical representation of the WindFloat Atlantic (WFA) Project, a floating offshore wind farms to be installed off the coast of northern Portugal.
The project consortium is composed of Principle Power, Akselos, the American Bureau of Shipping, the University of Washington-Applied Physics Laboratory, the University of California Berkeley, U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division, and EDP Renewables North America Offshore. The funding is part of the Aerodynamic Turbines Lighter and Afloat with Nautical Technologies and Integrated Servo-control (ATLANTIS) program, created by the Department of Energy to develop new floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) by maximising their rotor-area-to-total-weight ratio while maintaining or ideally increasing turbine generation efficiency; build a new generation of computer tools to facilitate floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) design; and collect real data from full and lab-scale experiments to validate the FOWT designs and computer tools.