What if a floating wind turbine were a living organism? What optimum shape would evolve into, subject to the Darwinian pressure of harsh offshore metocean conditions, and the constraints to deliver clean, safe and affordable energy?

Would this be similar to the configurations now proposed? Unlikely, since these are basically "slightly adapted" O&G industry configurations, developed for a very different context. So, how can we discover novel, more suitable floating wind turbines support platform configurations, building upon the O&G experience, but eliminating its bias? A novel, fundamental, first-principle based framework is needed.

To this end, a multidisciplinary design, analysis, and optimisation framework (MDAO) for floating offshore wind turbines (FOWT) support structures is being developed @ NAOME, called FEDORA (Fundamental Approach toward the Design of ORE devices). The student will be in charge of defining an LCoE model and numerically implementing it into the objective/s and/or constraint/s functions, and to assess the impact of these constraints on the optimised hull configuration.