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Joint project looks at noise reduction

By: Tom Russell 13/03/2018 Carbon Trust

Foundations General Windfarms

The Carbon Trust today announced the launch of BLUE PILOT, a large-scale demonstration project aimed at reducing costs and underwater noise during construction of offshore wind farms as part of the Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA).

The BLUE PILOT project will deploy The BLUE Hammer, a new type of pile driver developed by Fistuca BV., a Dutch technology company founded as a spin-off from Eindhoven University of Technology. Carbon Trust anticipates that the project will enable potential lifetime savings of up to €33-40m for a 720MW offshore wind farm, which is equal to a levelised cost of energy (LCoE) reduction of 0.9-1.2 €/MWh.

OWA partners E.ON, EnBW, Ørsted, Statoil and Vattenfall, alongside additional industry partners Fistuca, Van Oord, Shell and Sif are contributing €3.2m funding to the project. Due to the project’s potential to impact the cost of offshore wind RVO, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, has also granted public subsidies of over €2.5m.

The BLUE Hammer is predicted to reduce underwater noise levels by up to 20 dB (SEL), and potentially reduce the fatigue damage during installation on the pile by up to 90%. This could not only remove the need for underwater noise mitigation, but also enable secondary steel to be pre-welded to the monopile before installation, potentially unlocking ‘transition piece free’ designs. Furthermore, by reducing the amount of time and number of operations carried out offshore, the innovative piling method would improve health and safety and result in a significantly lower installation cost.

The BLUE PILOT project aims to verify these predictions through the installation of a full-size monopile offshore, using measurement equipment and sensors to validate the predicted noise levels and fatigue damage. The tests will take place during summer 2018 and high-level findings from the study will be made publically available later that year.

In the BLUE PILOT project the hammer will be tested offshore at a location in Dutch waters. Sif will provide the monopile, and Van Oord will support the installation logistics. The other industry partners will provide funding and strategic advice into the project to ensure its relevance to future commercial projects.

Fistuca BV developed the BLUE Hammer back in 2011 and originally tested the concept at a smaller scale supported by Van Oord together with a subsidy from the TKI Wind op Zee, a program by the RVO, supporting innovations for offshore wind. After a successful test of a prototype in 2016, Fistuca BV secured investment from Huisman Equipment and the RVO to manufacture a full-size hammer, capable of driving the largest XXL monopiles currently available in the market.

The BLUE Hammer consists of a large water tank that contains an open combustion chamber. Energy for driving the pile is created with gas combustion that accelerates a large column of water. As the column of water falls back to the bottom of the water tank, it decelerates transferring the energy into the pile. Due to the properties of water, this deceleration occurs over a longer time period than a conventional hydraulic hammer, providing a quieter, gentler but more energetic blow.

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Joint project looks at noise reduction

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