MADUROS

General information

Started: 01/12/2014
Theme: Durable & Sustainable Structural Materials
Program manager: Steven Keyzer (OCAS)

José Spinnewyn - 200x200

More info?

Contact our program manager José Spinnewyn.

Consortium

Industry:

Read more on the MADUROS content below

* Former members

Material Durability for Off-Shore

The energy challenge is one of the greatest tests faced by Europe and Flanders today. In 2010, the European Union adopted binding rules that 20% of the energy supply needs to be generated by renewable sources by 2020. Wind energy will provide an important contribution to achieving these targets. In order to increase efficiency, an increased trend towards off-shore wind energy has been observed as well as a constant increase in turbine size. To bring the cost of electricity generated by wind power down to a competitive level, technological research and development is needed on all aspects of the turbines.

The focus of the MaDurOS program is primarily on the steel support structures for off-shore wind turbines, more specifically on the material behavior under combined durability conditions: the combination of corrosion and abrasion and the combination of corrosion and fatigue.

Wind turbine

The gained knowledge will also be applicable to other metallic materials used in off-shore applications, such as for dredging.

There are three objectives in the MaDurOS program:

  • To gain deeper insight into the material behavior under combined durability conditions

  • Develop, build and offer medium/large scale combined loading testing facilities to allow for material screening or development

  • Develop new or improved alloys, material processing techniques, material applications and monitoring techniques to strengthen the long term competitive position of Flanders in the off-shore market.

A large group of Flemish industrial players in different domains and positions on the value chain has already committed to support this initiative:

MADUROS schematic

OCAS/ArcelorMittal, Jan De Nul, Allard, Elsyca, Laborelec, Bekaert, Vincotte, METAlogic, Smulders and Zensor. The associated knowledge centers for the MaDuROS program are: KULeuven, UGent, VUB, Sirris and BIL.

For more detailed background information regarding this research program, please consult the attached documents.

Projects

SEAFD (SBO)

The goal is to identify and predict the type of extreme weather events characteristic of the North Sea that are potentially leading to failures of bearing in wind turbines. A new high-resolution weather model will be developed and validated against true scale measurements on offshore wind turbines. It will allow prediction of local weather conditions at each rotor of a wind farm 36 hours ahead.
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MASIWEC (SBO)

The MaSiWEC project aims at a cost reduction of wind energy by development of innovative methodologies to better understand premature bearing failures and predicting such failures well in advance. The project brings added value to new generators of wind turbines, improved retrofits by better redesigned gearboxes, and reduction in down-time by early fault detection.
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PRINT-AM (ICON)

Current international state of the art in wire & arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) of large-scale steel components mainly focuses on realising a correct geometry and a lot of uncertainties remain to linking the final functional properties with the printing material and strategy. Therefore the ICON project PRINT-AM is envisaging to develop both the missing modelling as well as experimental screening capabilities.
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DEMOPRECI-MDT (SBO)

The off-shore environment puts severe durability requirements on materials. A clear need for advanced test infrastructure was therefore identified: a tool to validate materials for use in certain conditions and an understanding of how the combined damage mechanisms work as a requirement for proper designing the test setups as well as for generating tools to understand and extrapolate the test results generated.
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