Eleven companies and 22 research centres have joined forces on the AZIMUT, Offshore Wind Energy 2020 project, for the purpose of generating the know-how required to develop a large-scale marine wind turbine using 100% Spanish technology. The project, coordinated by Gamesa, involves lead partners such as Alstom Wind, Acciona Windpower, Iberdrola Renovables and Acciona Energía; with other participants including Técnicas Reunidas, Ingeteam, Ingeciber, Imatia, Tecnitest Ingenieros and DIgSILENT Ibérica.

AZIMUT was approved by Spain’s Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI), a unit of the Science and Innovation Ministry, within the framework of the sixth round of research and development (R&D) grants through the CENIT (National Strategic Consortium in Technical Research) Programme. The project has a total budget of 25 million euros and is co-financed by the participating companies.

The main objective of the collaboration between Gamesa and IMDEA Materials Institute is to apply advanced simulation tools to predict the mechanical behaviour of composite materials for a wind turbine blade in order to improve offshore reliability, including the analysis of the effect of defects.

In particular, it is foreseen to study the effect of defects generated during the manufacture of various components of the blade, for example, the wrinkles in the fabric, voids, play cutting, thickness variation, etc. These tasks are intended to be addressed with the help of computational mechanics based on the finite element method, including the effect of material damage.