Windpower TV Interviews Dagher, Viselli About Floating Turbine Platforms
Habib Dagher, director of the Advanced Structures and Composites Center at the University of Maine; and Anthony Viselli, an engineer at the UMaine Composites Center, sat down with Windpower TV to speak about developing the floating platform for VolturnUS, an offshore wind turbine prototype that was deployed off the coast of Castine. Project manager Dagher and design manager Viselli said their research showed concrete hulls can bring down the coasts of floating platforms by around 50 percent. “The purpose of the concrete hull is to drive down costs and to access the assets of the civil engineering construction engineering industry,” Dagher said. “So we want to build these hulls just like we build concrete bridges to be able to build them dockside and tow them out. The concrete technology allows us to access 40 years of industrialization for bridge construction, and we’re bringing that into the offshore wind industry. In the U.S. at least, we’re seeing a reduction of at least 50 percent compared to a steel hull.”