Creadis, a LIGHTWIND partner, has finished manufacturing and assembling scaled test specimens for the project’s drivetrain concept. This marks a new stage in LIGHTWIND’s offshore wind drivetrain testing under Work Package 4 (WP4). Creadis has now sent the specimens to Fraunhofer IWES in Hamburg, one of the project’s German partners. The next phase of testing starts there.
What is a scaled specimen, and why build one before the full-size version?
Engineers often build a smaller, scaled version of a new component before committing to the full-size one. This lets them see how a design behaves under real physical loads, not only in a simulation. It also avoids the cost and lead time of manufacturing something at full offshore scale.
For LIGHTWIND, the specimen represents part of the project’s drivetrain concept. A drivetrain converts the rotor’s slow rotation into the speed a generator needs to produce electricity. Testing a scaled version first is a standard step for hardware still at an early stage of development.
Why this step matters for the project
WP4 brings LIGHTWIND’s individual components together into a scaled prototype of the complete drivetrain system. Here, the team measures how the system behaves mechanically, including its stiffness and how it deforms under load. That data then feeds into the design of the full-scale drivetrain. Completing these test specimens marks a concrete step toward that scaled prototype work.
Fraunhofer IWES, Creadis and TNO are jointly building expertise in constructing and testing complex system demonstrators like this one. The partners expect to reuse that practical experience in future projects, commercial or public.
The stiffness and deformation results from this next stage of testing aren’t ready yet. We’ll share them, along with what they mean for the drivetrain design, once the technical team validates them.
What happens next
This next stage of offshore wind drivetrain testing now moves to Fraunhofer IWES’s facility in Hamburg. The team there specialises in large-scale structural testing for wind energy components. Further updates will follow as results come in.
Read more about how WP4 fits into the rest of the project on our Work Packages page. Catch up on other recent updates in our news section.