General – Floating Wind
UK company Marine Power Systems (MPS) has teamed up with Dutch cable manufacturer FibreMax to provide integrated floating foundation and tendon solutions to the rapidly growing floating offshore wind sector.
The tendon solution will be used in the anchoring and moorings of their tension leg platform (TLP), PelaFlex, to deliver the highest system stability and zero tilt. It will be the world’s first tension leg platform with FibreMax tendons, made with Twaron fiber from Teijin, the industry leader in aramid fibres. Compared to traditional steel moorings synthetic cable offers a much better strength to weight ratio, longer operational life and lower levels of maintenance.
FibreMax, based in the Netherlands, have been producing the world’s strongest synthetic cables and supplying them to the offshore renewables industry since 2009. Their unique and proprietary process uses endless winding technology to continuously wind parallel strands of fibres until the right cable strength and length is reached. This creates cables that are said to be with the highest breaking load, very low stretch and lowest diameter possible.
Gareth Stockman, CEO at MPS commented: “We see our partners and suppliers as very much part of our team, and with the addition of FibreMax we are benefiting from the very best expertise in the industry and developing an extremely credible floating offshore wind delivery solution for the global market.”
Marine Power Systems’ floating offshore platform technology offers the benefit of a significantly reduced system mass. Moreover, its modular and flexible design, enables optimum local content delivery through a decentralised logistics model. These benefits provide utility scale developers maximum flexibility between reducing cost and increasing local economic benefits, whilst in parallel accelerating farm deployment at scale.
Sander van Helvoort, Director Renewable Energy at FibreMax commented: “We’re proud to be part of the Marine Power Systems team and delivering our unique tendons for the World’s first TLP with synthetic tendons. This brings together two unique and innovative technologies, the PelaFlex floating platform and the FibreMax tendons made with circular Twaron (Aramid) fibres made by Teijin. While working with Marine Power Systems we’ve developed an excellent relationship which is now formalised and will allow both MPS and FibreMax to further expand, support and develop our relationship to deliver successful projects.”
