The ModConFlex consortium comprises a group of 10 academics and 4 senior researchers in industry (ORE Catapult) with expertise in control theory, artificial intelligence, complex dynamical systems, distributed parameter systems, fluid dynamics, aeroelasticity, power electronics, power systems, swimming theory and marine engineering. Our aim is to train the next generation of researchers on the modelling and control of flexible structures interacting with fluids (water and air), contributing to the latest advances in control theory, artificial intelligence and energy-based modelling. Our main applications are in the control of floating wind turbines (the prime renewable energy source of the future), and in the control of highly flexible aircraft, aircraft with very high aspect ratio. Our research plans are organized into three scientific work packages, which cover mathematical systems theory (modelling and model reduction, boundary control systems, port-Hamiltonian systems, exact beam theory), relevant aspects of control theory (internal model controllers with anti-windup, nonlinear model predictive control, robust control), reinforcement learning, aeroelasticity, stochastic algorithms. We believe that science and technology in Europe will greatly benefit from this research, and from the education and knowledge that we will impart to a new generation of researchers. Key strengths of this consortium include a research environment that brings together mathematicians and engineers to provide the project's young researchers with a unique training environment, and a network of associated industrial partners that will allow all the young researchers to participate in industrial secondments. We have the critical mass to cover all aspects of training, and we have an excellent track record of past collaboration and of training young researchers.

Renewable power is one of the main drives to achieve carbon reduction and net-zero, and to meet the ambitious climate goals. In particular, offshore wind power in Europe has been developing at a rapid pace in recent years. Multi-Giga watts offshore wind farms with larger wind turbine power ratings, floating wind turbines installed in deeper water areas, and higher ratio of renewables integrated to existing power grids, are fundamentally changing power system operations and bringing new challenges and technical demands. This industry-doctorate consortium, ADOreD, will recruit and train 15 Researchers by collaborating with 19 academic and industrial organisations. It aims to tackle the academic and technical challenges in the areas of transmission of offshore wind power to the AC grid by using power electronics-based AC/DC technologies. In doing so, it will equip the Researchers, through their PhD studies, with essential knowledge and skills to face fast energy transition in their future careers. The project covers 3 key research aspects: offshore wind (including wind turbines, wind power collection, and wind farm design and control); DC technologies (including AC/DC converters, HVDC control and DC network operation and protection); and AC grid (including stability and control of AC grids dominated with converters under various control modes. The ADOreD consortium has excellent coverage of academic universities and industry organisations including manufacturers, energy utilities, system operators, consultancy and technology innovation centres. All the research questions in the project reflect industry needs; academic novelty and innovation will be reflected in the methodologies and solutions; and the research results will be disseminated directly to the industry partners' products, grid operation and services. The outcomes of the project are both technologies and a talent pool to accelerate the deployment and grid integration of large-scale offshore wind power.

This prosperity partnership project, UNITE, brings Fugro Ltd, a major Tier 1 offshore service provider, together with a world-leading robotics research team from Heriot-Watt University and Imperial College London to address key open research challenges for safe and robust robotic solutions in the offshore renewable sector. It specifically focuses on the development and deployment of perception-enabled, risk-aware underwater intervention techniques, which are critical for the widespread adoption of robotics solutions in this rapidly expanding sector. The vision of the UNITE project is to develop a holistic solution to autonomous and semi-autonomous underwater intervention applied to the maintenance and repair of offshore wind farms, remotely monitored from shore and safely operated worldwide. UNITE's research vision and programme aim at reducing the use of crewed support vessels for operation, keeping offshore turbines more productive with less downtime and more timely and cost-effective maintenance and repair. This will also support the industry to cut costs and carbon footprint while dramatically improving health&safety. In a world where climate change is increasingly impacting our lives, we need to accelerate the energy transition towards net-zero. The UK has a huge potential for Offshore Wind Energy and the UK government has made this a priority, planning to reach 1TW by 2050. To reach such ambitious targets, you have to imagine 10's of thousands of offshore wind turbines, deployed in some of the harshest environments on earth and able to reliably produce energy for decades. At present, the cost of operation and maintenance of such wind farms is 30% of the overall cost and is performed using manned vessels deployed in extreme environments, hence reducing the operational window they can be deployed, increasing the carbon footprint of operations and risk to the personnel deployed offshore. This will simply not scale when more and more wind farms are built and the availability, environmental impact and cost of the current solutions will no longer make sense. What is required is to replace these large assets by smaller, more environmentally friendly and cost effective robotic solutions, controlled safely from shore by a new generation of pilots, engineers and operators. This is already a reality, at least in advanced demonstrator form, when we are only interested in inspection. Remote drones, surface vessels and underwater systems can be sent to inspect subsea cables, turbines and other subsea assets. In some cases, they can be permanently deployed for long periods of time. However, when more complex tasks requiring intervention (contact and manipulation) are required, the current technology is not ready, especially in cases where the communication link between the robot and shore is intermittent, slow or unreliable. If not solved, this will dramatically impact the adoption of robotics (as existing solutions will still need to be deployed), and potentially stop it in its track, in turn reducing the progress of offshore renewable energy as a viable clean energy source. New research is needed to endow the remote robotic platforms with the intervention capabilities they require, as well as ensuring that the platforms are safe even when not in direct control of a human. For this to happen, robots (and their sensors) must be able to build an accurate map of the world around them and use this map to navigate around obstacles and towards targets of interest. They need to be able to interact with the structures safely (controlling force of interaction) and grasp objects whilst being subject to potentially significant external disturbances (currents, waves, etc) and coordinate their respective actions (e.g surface vehicle deploying an underwater system). They also need to understand when they might fail and alert an operator on shore to ask for support. This is what the UNITE proposal will tackle.

The UK presently has the largest installed capacity of offshore wind, accounting for 36% of global capacity in 2017. The offshore wind industry contributed 9.8% of the UK's power in the 3rd quarter of 2019. In the 2019 Offshore Wind Sector Deal, the sector committed to building up to 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030, with an ambition of increasing exports fivefold to £2.6bn. The Committee on Climate Change has recommended an installed capacity of 75 GW by 2050. Nearly all offshore wind turbines installed to date have been mounted on fixed bottom support structures located in water depths up to 60 m. Given the limited availability of suitable sites at such water depths, Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWT) will become increasingly important over the next decade to achieve the Offshore Wind Sector Deal goals and to help achieve the UK target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The Sector Deal highlights the need for government to develop frameworks to support the advancement of technologies such as FOWT. Physical modelling is a critical tool for the development of a floating offshore wind turbine and is recommended in most development guidelines. This is especially true at early stages of the development of new concept with a technology readiness level (TRL) between 1 and 3. Testing model devices at scale in the controlled environment of a laboratory has many advantages. These include the proof (or otherwise) of novel design concepts, the ability to test in systematically changing conditions and the ability to test in conditions which have low occurrence probabilities (i.e. extreme events). Quantitative measurements of motions and loads on scaled FOWT models can be made with much greater ease and accuracy then at full scale at sea. Qualitative observations are far easier to observe as well. If done correctly these measurements and observations can lead to the evolution of device designs and concepts and reduce the chance of costly failure; if and when devices are eventually deployed at sea. The University of Plymouth COAST laboratory (www.plymouth.ac.uk/coast-laboratory) is a state-of-the-art research facility for the study of wave and current interaction with offshore and coastal structures using scaled physical modelling. It houses the Ocean Basin, a 35 m x 15.5 m tank with a raisable floor that can enable testing at water depths between 0.5 and 3 m. This project will establish the UKFOWTT - UK Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Test facility within the Ocean Basin. In addition to the wave and current generation that COAST can presently deliver, UKFOWTT will add wind generation to COAST. This will consist of a bank of axial fans, mounted on a gantry spanning the tank width and have the ability to generate winds up to 10 m/s, model gusting and have a controllable wind profile. The generator will be moveable vertically from just at the water's surface to approximately 1 m above. It will be rotatable +/- 30 degrees relative to the basin, enabling the influence of wave/current/wind/model alignment to be investigated. The primary purpose of UKFOWTT is to enable both fundamental and applied research in topics related to Floating Offshore Wind. This will be a unique facility within the UK, enabling systematic physical modelling experiments with wind, wave and currents simultaneously. Data collected from physical modelling can improve understanding of the underlying physics, support development of analytical theories and validate advanced numerical models. It is also a low risk method of testing new and novel concepts. UKFOWTT provides the associated instrumentation to support these studies. UKFOWTT will also support research in other sectors of Ocean and Coastal Engineering disciplines, including the Oil and Gas sector, floating wave, tidal and solar energy, autonomous vessels, launch and recovery operations and coastal defenses.

In recent years, the cost of energy produced by renewable supplies has steadily decreased. This factor, together with socio-economical reasons, has made renewable energies increasingly competitive, as confirmed by industry growth figures. Considering wind turbines (WTs), there are some interesting technical challenges associated with the drive to build larger, more durable rotors that produce more energy, in a cheaper, more cost efficient way. The rationale for moving towards larger rotors is that, with current designs, the power generated by WTs is theoretically proportional to the square of the blade length. Furthermore, taller WTs operate at higher altitudes and, on average, at greater wind speeds. Hence, in general, a single rotor can produce more energy than two rotors with half the area. However, larger blades are heavier, more expensive and increasingly prone to greater aerodynamic and inertial forces. In fact, it has been shown that they exhibit a cubic relationship between length and mass, meaning that material costs, inertial and self-weight effects grow faster than the energy output as the blade size increases. In addition, larger blades also have knock-on implications for the design of nacelle components. The wind-field through which the rotor sweeps varies both in time and space. Consequently, the force and torque distributions for the blades exhibit strong peaks at frequencies which are integer multiples of the rotor speed. Additional peaks are induced by lightly damped structural modes. The loads on the blades combine to produce unbalanced loads on the rotor which are transmitted to the hub, main bearing and other drive-train components. These unbalanced loads are a major contribution to the lifetime equivalent fatigue loads for some components which could cause premature structural failure. As the size of the blades increase, the unbalanced loads increase and the frequency of the spectral peaks decrease. Hence, they have an increasing impact as the size of the turbines become bigger. In this scenario, the demand for improvements in blade design is evident. The notion of increasingly mass efficient turbines, which are also able to harvest more energy, is immediately attractive. The viability of a novel adaptive blade concept for use with horizontal axis WTs is studied in this project. By suitably tailoring the elastic response of a blade to the aerodynamic pressure it could be possible to improve a turbine's annual energy production, whilst simultaneously alleviating structural loads. These improvements are obtained in a passive adaptive manner, by exploiting the capabilities that structural anisotropy and geometrically induced couplings provide. In particular, induced elastic twist could be used to vary the angle of attack of the blade sections according to power requirements, i.e. the elastic twist is tailored to change with wind speed proportionally to the bending load. The adaptive behaviour allows the blade geometry to follow the theoretically optimum shape for power generation closely (which varies as a function of the far field wind speed). This concept retains the load alleviation capability of previously proposed designs, whilst simultaneously enhancing energy production. Structurally, the adaptive behaviour is achieved by merging the bend-twist coupling capabilities of off-axis composite plies and of a swept blade planform. Potentially, an adaptive blade, controlled only by generator torque, could perform to power standards comparable to that of the current state-of-the-art-while greatly reducing complexity, cost and maintenance of wind turbines, by challenging the need for active pitch control systems.