Wind Farm Design and Optimization

Project description

Since its initial steps, offshore wind harvest has seen a rapid and steady increase. The installed capacity of the most recent offshore wind farms is incomparable higher than the ones initially seen. Moreover due to the higher amount of wind turbines and required cables the complexity of such systems was also aggravated.

Unfortunately, up to today, offshore wind farms make use of adapted products from other fields. For example, onshore wind turbines and foundations designed using oil&gas industry standards. Furthermore, the supply chain that serves offshore wind projects is immature and operates on a non-standard project-by-project basis.

Designing a large offshore wind project is a very complex task. In the development phase of a large offshore wind farm, an enormous amount of time is spent in creating wind farm designs. The mundane manual layout optimization and cable routing, for example, is highly time consuming. Moreover, the components and technologies that will lead to an optimized and feasible system have to be assessed. Circa 4% of the total investment costs of an offshore wind project are allocated for development&consent.

Current wind farm design processes have another important drawback: the design is based in a sequential approach. Such strategy does not guarantee system optimality since interactions between the different system components are disregarded. Moreover, with such design methodology, decisions made in early project phases may become constraints in later stages.

Due to the rapidly growth of offshore wind installed capacity as well as the increased need for optimization as presented before, the main research question of this project is formulated as:

• How to design a multi-objective optimization framework for offshore wind farm electrical infrastructures?