Project: MD500 WIND - Robotic Submarine Geotechnical Site Investigation for Offshore Wind ProjectWind integrated platform for 10+ MW power per foundation

The towers, cables and other structures that constitute an Offshore Wind (OSW) park are supported on the seafloor. The characteristics of the soils and rocks present at any site are crucial for the OSW park design: insufficient site knowledge may seriously jeopardize installation and/or operation. Site investigation for OSW today implies taking soil and rocks samples from scarce and expensive jack-up platforms and/or drilling vessels in a process that is slow and very sensitive to weather conditions. Geotechnical site investigation is thus a bottleneck for large-scale OSW deployment. Remotely operated submarine systems make site investigation largely independent of weather and do not require specialist deployment means (drilling vessels and/or jack-ups). They can thus offer a substantial reduction in operation cost and extend the time window for site investigation, removing that bottleneck. This project aims to launch a new remotely operated seafloor-based site investigation system into the OSW market. A recently developed robotic general-purpose submarine drilling machine will be tooled for the specific site investigation requirements of OSW. The system will be tested at sea, to provide a demonstration of capabilities in a realistic commercial-like scenario. The state-of-the-art characteristics of the sampling and testing performed will be independently documented.

Acronym	MDWIND (Reference Number: DW193)
Duration	01/01/2016 - 30/06/2019
Project Topic	Offshore Wind, Topic 3 - Foundation structures
Project Results (after finalisation)	Not available yet - project starting April 2016.
Website	visit project website
Network	DemoWind
Call	Joint Call 2015

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	Igeotest SL	Coordinator	Spain
2	MG3 (Survey) UK Limited	Partner	United Kingdom