Developments in Renewable Energies Offshore

Abstract

The Blue Growth Farm" is an ongoing H2020 European project, aimed to the development, engineering and demonstration of a new floating multi-purpose platform concept, devoted to aquaculture, and wind-wave energy production. Due to the significant complexity of the coupled dynamic behavior of the proposed concept, model tests are essential to investigate the most relevant physical phenomena and validate/calibrate the pertinent numerical models. However, the realization of a scaled model of such structure is by itself quite challenging, since each sub-system follows its own scaling laws and requires different strategies to minimize scale effects. The aim of the present paper is to describe the arrangement of the experimental activities, discussing the mechanisms of the scale factor at different scales and related results accuracy, scaling strategies and test environments. The two-phase framework and the scaling strategies proposed may be also useful for future activities on similar concepts.