ICONIC aims to develop innovative physical and digital tools to achieve fundamental breakthroughs for the integrated control of wind farms, considering the whole physical system at farm, turbine, and component levels, in particular the complex aerodynamic interactions among turbines. ICONIC aims to increase farm-wide power production by 15-20% under optimal wind speeds and directions for typical wind farms suffering from wake effects, with a 3%-5% increase in annual energy production (AEP) considering all working conditions over the long term. It targets an LCOE reduction of at least 6% compared with the state-of-the-art control tools deployed in the current wind industry by improving farm-wide AEP and reducing operation & maintenance costs via leveraging the latest AI and digital technologies. Extensive validations for the integrated wind farm control solutions will be conducted via high-fidelity simulation models, experiments at a national-level wind tunnel, historical operational data at BP’s and C-Power’s wind farms, a unique collection of test rigs for critical turbine components at respective companies, and real-world wind farm field tests at C-Power. ICONIC’s integrated wind farm control system will contain (1) novel AI-based wind farm control system to unlock wind farms’ full potential; (2) novel data-enhanced wind turbine controllers to fulfil farm-level commands while balancing power generation and load mitigation; (3) an integration with digital twins (DTs) as extra support to improve control and reduce costs, which contains a first-ever farm-level DT for wind farm flow systems replicating detailed physical flow fields and an innovative turbine-level DT with critical component models for loading and lifetime estimations; (4) extensions of the solutions to future 20MW turbines. ICONIC will establish new knowledge and industrial leadership in key digital, enabling and emerging technologies, and deliver next-generation tools for wind farm operation.

Emerging technologies as Offshore Wind Energy, demand new advanced solutions for reducing Operation & Maintenance (O&M) costs, as well as for performing the reliability and extended life-time of wind turbines (WT) and farms (WF). In this sense, ROMEO is a 5 years project whose main objective is to develop and demonstrate an O&M information management and analytics platform capable of improving the decision making processes of offshore WF operators allowing the transition from calendar base maintenance to condition-based maintenance strategies reducing significantly O&M costs. Thus, a flexible and interoperable IoT platform will provide an advanced analytics ecosystem to better understand the real time behaviour of the main components of the WTs under operation conditions; maximizing their life-time and reducing the need for maintenance, thus minimizing the OPEX which drastically impact on LCoE of offshore Wind Energy. The project has been structured in three phases: 1st phase “specifications” will pave th

The future wind turbines will require flexible and economically affordable PDPs to obtain reliable and validated new concepts for bigger wind turbines or already installed turbines. One of the most critical components that have a high contribution to wind farms OpEx costs are the bearings (selected Case Studies 1 and 3 during INNTERESTING) and gearboxes (selected Case Study 2 during INNTERESTING). Since both components transfer high loads and have high failure rates, they are considered as critical components inside the wind turbine. Although the percentage of the total Capex cost of bearings (2% ) is not as high as other structures (e.g. blades 22% and gearbox 13%) , their role is not insignificant.However, the role of bearings and gears in the OpEx is higher due to the major impact of early. The fatigue requirements that must be assured for the lifetime is a key factor to reduce the negative effect of reparations. New wind energy key concepts and uses which are faster to commercialisation have been prioritised: INNTERESTING project aims to accelerate wind energy technology development and increase lifetime extension of wind turbine components by developing a disruptive methodology to demonstrate reliability of larger wind turbine critical components without the need of building larger test-benches in the future by overcoming size dependent issues during design process and testing. In this matter, INNTERESTING project pursues the development of innovative virtual and hybrid testing methods for prototype validation of pitch bearing and gearboxes components (Selected Study Cases Components). The new methodology will help saving time and money during the product development process (PDP) by integrating virtual testing and hybrid testing: including innovative non-physical and scaled/simplified physical testing. In comparison with current methodologies INNTERESTING will reduce considerable environmental and economic impacts, and improve social acceptance.