First Steps towards Sustainable-by-Design Anchors for Floating Offshore Wind




First Steps towards Sustainable-by-Design Anchors for Floating Offshore Wind


The Horizon Europe research project TAILWIND aims to advance station-keeping system technologies for floating offshore wind farms. This paper marks the first steps in the project putting forward economic, environmental, and technological key performance indicators to assist the selection and development of anchors. Scenarios in terms of location, soil profile, and floater are defined. Anchor loading histories are obtained through coupled load simulations and used to design typical anchors. Key performance indicators describing three sustainability aspects economic, environmental, and technological are proposed to assess the industrial feasibility of each anchor type. The study has two outcomes. Firstly, sustainability key performance indicators that can guide the selection of anchor technologies for future floating offshore wind development are proposed. Secondly, guidance on the most promising anchor for further development via experimental testing and numerical modelling within the TAILWIND project is provided.



Aligi Foglia; Zefeng Zhou; Yufei Wang; O. Polania; C. Olsen; David Van den Berg; Benjamin Cerfontaine; David White; Susan M. Gourvenec; Miguel Angel Cabrera; K. Gavin; Athanasios Kolios; Noor Laham


5th International Symposium on Frontiers in Offshore Geotechnics (ISFOG2025)



13 - Developmental foundation and anchoring concepts: hybrid foundations, ring anchors, helical piles, torpedo, shared anchoring



https://doi.org/10.53243/ISFOG2025-239