China: Cast polyurethane elastomers for offshore wind farms

Covestro and Tekmar Energy Ltd. have signed a cooperation agreement on a high-performance and durable subsea cable protection for the China Offshore Wind Farm (OWF) market. This market is set to grow towards 10 gigawatts of capacity within the next three to five years. Once operational, China’s OWF capacity will be one of the world’s largest in terms of size and production output, surpassing the scale of the entire existing and planned European production capacity in volume.

Both companies will collaborate on the development of Cable Protection Systems (CPS). They protect expensive and sensitive subsea energy cables at vulnerable locations from the wave and tidal action amongst other external forces. The development covers many solutions from bend stiffeners to bend restrictors, many of which are using TEKLINK® CPS developed by Tekmar based on Covestro specialty elastomers materials.

TEKLINK® CPS by Tekmar is a patented CPS for connection and protection of cables in wind turbine foundations. It involves several products such as stiffeners for damping movement, bend restrictors for offering lock-out protection and split-pipes for ballast and stability.Together they enable to improve longevity and performance of offshore wind farms, to significantly increase the productivity and safety of the installation process and thereby to help the project owners to gain time and save money.

Throughout the development phase of these high-performance subsea cable protection solutions, Covestro provided crucial support in elastomers chemistry and processing expertise. The developed system leads to highly robust elastomers suitable for resisting severe offshore environmental conditions. To achieve the required impact and hydrolysis resistance for this application, Covestro recommended a system based on its well-known Desmodur® and Baytec® technologies.

As part of the cooperation agreement, Covestro will supply elastomer casting machinery, elastomer systems as well as processing know-how to enable the manufacturing of the cable protection systems in China developed by Tekmar in the UK.

“Thanks to this cooperation agreement, we welcome the opportunity to strengthen our partnership with Tekmar”, said Michael Friede, CEO & President of Covestro Elastomers SAS. ”We both established our technologies as the reference point for cable protection for offshore wind farms in Europe. We aim to build on these successes and act as vanguard in China. We look forward to further develop and introduce our new materials and technology for Tekmar’s future generation products.”

James Ritchie, chief executive officer at Tekmar added, “The China Offshore Wind Market is an exciting expansion opportunity for Tekmar as it will reinforce our market leading position on a global basis. Our proven solution is already being installed in the region on the Formosa offshore wind farm project in Taiwan. Further we look forward to working in collaboration with our proven EU supplier Covestro, who has resources and facilities in Shanghai that will help us both to develop this emerging market.”