IROE PhD student Oscar Festa presents work at Floating Offshore Wind Conference, France

The Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) conference is the world’s largest event dedicated to floating offshore wind turbines, co-organized by the Pôle Mer Méditerranée and the French Wind Energy Association (France Energie Eolienne). The 10th edition, held in Nantes from the 10th to 12th of May 2023, brought together 1400 participants from more than 30 different countries. Researchers, industry leaders and investors met for 3 days to exchange views on the latest technological innovation and research in floating offshore wind energy.

IROE PhD student Oscar Festa was in attendance and presented his latest research on neural-network based optimisation of mooring systems for floating wind turbines. The aim of Oscar's presentation was to demonstrate the use of neural networks (trained from time-domain dynamic analyses) to efficiently design mooring systems with the optimal compliance to fit project constraints. This neural-network based approach was shown to be quicker than traditional iterative approaches, and resulted in significant reductions in cost and environmental impact of the final mooring designs. The presentation was well-received, and it gave Oscar the opportunity to discuss his research with relevant industry players such as the load reduction TFI Marine and Dublin Offshore.