Digital twin technology applied to Hexicon’s floating twin turbine

The digital twin technology will be applied to Hexicon’s floating foundation – a Stockholm based company developing floating offshore wind farms and designing twin turbine floating wind power platforms. Akselos will provide performance insights that can be used to make the structure more efficient in deeper waters with faster wind speeds.

It is expected that Akselos’ results will allow advanced optimisation of the floating structure, leading to reductions in weight and construction cost before Hexicon further commercialises their asset at a greater scale in the future.

Earlier in 2021, Akselos announced a distributor deal with Worley, a leading global provider of professional project and asset services in the energy, chemicals, and resources sectors.   Worley will market, license and distribute Akselos’ predictive digital twin technology to companies across the world in a range of industries. This most recent deal sees Worley distribute Akselos’ technology to Hexicon.

Michiel van Haersma Buma, Vice-President for Customer Success at Akselos, said: “At Akselos we’re passionate about the development of offshore wind and how we can optimise operations and speed up the rate at which wind is deployed. A more complex engineering challenge such as a twin turbine requires an innovative engineering solution, something our digital twin technology is well equipped to do.

This project is a great example of how innovation and technology can come together to provide meaningful results. Together with Worley we are expanding the boundaries of engineering to enable future industry growth and get the world closer to the pathway laid out by the International Energy Agency for reaching net zero by 2050. We’re looking forward to working with Worley and Hexicon and seeing the results of the project.

This is just one of the results of our distributor deal with Worley that was announced earlier in 2021, and it’s great to see continued expansion.” 

Marcus Thor, CEO of Hexicon, said: “It’s apparent that we need innovative digital solutions that can challenge both the weight and integrity of structures to help drive scalability and system efficiencies towards the industrialisation of floating wind. As this project moves towards construction, we’re excited to learn that our FEED and EPF contractor, Worley, will be adopting Akselos predictive digital technology to maximise optimisation within our structure. Providing benefits to this project and helping to generate significant learnings for future generation projects too.”

Chris Cowland, Vice President Global Offshore Wind at Worley, said: “We’re pleased to use this technology in collaboration with Akselos on Hexicon’s TwinWind project, as part of our engineering and fabrication approach. Adopting smarter, integrated solutions to generate meaningful cost reductions for our customers is core to our ambition of becoming a world leader in floating wind.

Akeslos’ digital twin technology is allowing the world’s largest renewable structures to be simulated and designed more efficiently by using a combination of AI and traditional physics based approaches to computational modelling. Akselos and Lamprell recently proved that the use of this predictive digital twin technology can reduce the steel weight and associated costs of offshore wind jacket foundations by up to 30%.