The Blue Growth Farm project: our “Aurora” prototype has now successfully completed its service time
In the first week of February 2022, the Blue Growth Farm project reached another key milestone towards its completion.
The AURORA scaled outdoor prototype, deployed at the NOEL (Mediterranea University) offshore site (Reggio Calabria, Italy) in March 2021, served a number of measurement trials in a real environment, under representative ocean wave conditions, up to late September 2021, before being decommissioned in these days.
Built in Ancona (Italy), at Fincosit premises, AURORA moved to the Port of Reggio Calabria on a towed by tug pontoon in February 2021, and there equipped with technologies. Thanks to AURORA sensing capacity, the project Consortium has gained an unprecedented insight about the platform stability, the complex aero-hydrodynamic interaction with the scaled wind turbine, the energy absorption by the structure and by the wave energy converter chambers and subtracted to waves within the platform pool for the ideal fish growth, the overall sensing monitoring capacity for remote management, all fundamental aspects for the full scale engineering design.
Following the design phase, processed by Safier Ingenierie, University of Strathclyde, Fincosit, with the contribution of all project partners, the construction, integration with technologies and deployment have been carried out by Fincosit, with NOEL, Wavenergy.it, CHLAMYS, Politecnico di Milano, Ditrel, TECNALIA and RINA support, whilst the experimental trials have seen the participatory collaboration of NOEL, Wavenergy.it, Politecnico di Milano, RINA, Ditrel and TECNALIA. The decommissioning of AURORA has been conducted by Fincosit, with the assistance of NOEL, Wavenergy.it, Politecnico di Milano, CHLAMYS and RINA.
AURORA results have then provided valuable input to refine numerical models developed by the University of Strathclyde for reliable employment in the full scale engineering development. Then, a very complex engineering challenge afforded by a multidisciplinary, fully integrated, single European team.
To discover more about the successful integration management and performance of the AURORA scaled outdoor prototype you can also watch our latest video by clicking the button below.
