Final Scientific/Technical Report: Floating Offshore-Wind and Controls Advanced Laboratory Experiment

The Floating Offshore-wind and Controls Advanced Laboratory (FOCAL) helped to streamline floating wind platform designs using control co-design methodologies. The FOCAL project generated the first public floating offshore wind turbine dataset to include advanced turbine controls, floating hull load mitigation technology, and hull flexibility to enable the development of more optimized floating wind platforms using a control co-design (CCD) approach. The project consisted of four model-scale FOWT experimental campaigns in the University of Maine's Alfond Wind-Wave Ocean Engineering Laboratory (W2) using a scaled version of the IEA Wind 15-MW reference wind turbine supported by the VolturnUS-S steel semisubmersible hull. These campaigns addressed two notable limitations of existing experimental datasets: the influence of flexibility on system response and limited control strategy implementation. The dataset is publicly available at https://a2e.energy.gov/project/focal, and can be used to validate modeling tools essential for performing control co-design optimization. This validation is necessary for designing the controller and support structure of a floating offshore wind turbine together to achieve optimal performance.