Faces of DIMPACT

The DIMPACT project aims to better characterise the slamming forces and the effects of wave breaking on offshore floating wind turbines. It is led by Jean-François Filipot, Scientific Director of France Energies Marines. Whether it is modelling or in situ instrumentation, the talents required to carry out this study are numerous. That is why we wanted to give the floor to five members of the team to find out more about their different backgrounds, their role within the project and the way they interact.

Marc BATLLE MARTIN
EDF R&D Centre, Chatou

Marc is from Catalonia. He began his university studies in civil engineering, specialising in hydraulics and hydrology, at the Polytechnic University of Madrid. During his second year of the Master’s programme, he had the opportunity, via the Erasmus programme, to spend a semester at the Ecole supérieure d’ingénieurs des travaux de la construction (ESITC) in Caen. He also did an internship in Rouen, in the CORIA laboratory specialising in active flows, turbulence and optics. In 2017, with his degree in hand, Marc decided to take a year off. He went to Japan to do volunteer work and discover this country which is full of magnificent natural landscapes. Back in Europe, he joined the Red Cross to help with schooling for several months. In 2018, he was selected to start a thesis at the Laboratoire Ondes et Milieux Complexes of the Université Le Havre Normandie. His work focuses on the numerical simulation of the effect of extreme waves on coastal structures and ORE systems. After completing his doctorate, Marc was recruited to carry out a post-doctorate on the simulation of the impact of breaking waves on floating wind turbines as part of the DIMPACT project. For him, the strong point of France Energies Marines is that it is built on a public-private partnership that allows for highly applied research.

Paul RENAUD
France Energies Marines, Brest

Paul was born in Saint-Brieuc and is passionate about sailing and underwater hunting. He entered a preparatory class in Rennes in 2014. Three years later, he began a naval and offshore architecture engineering course at ENSTA Bretagne, with a specialisation in hydrodynamics. His second year was marked by an internship in the Netherlands in a luxury yacht design firm. After graduation, Paul was offered a one-year assignment at the Institut de Recherche Dupuy de Lôme (IRDL). He then worked on a project for a ship intended for the maintenance of wind farms, for which he had to optimise the hull, evaluate the behaviour at sea and limit the resistance to forward movement, using a metamodel. As he is keen to remain in the field of ORE and in Brittany, he is applying to France Energies Marines in 2021 to develop an analytical model of the slamming forces of breakers on offshore wind turbines. This work, which is part of the DIMPACT project, aims to obtain a tool for rapid numerical simulations that can be used as a first approach during the design phase. For the future, Paul is aiming for international positions as he is keen to cultivate this aspect that he greatly appreciated during his studies.

Florian HULIN
France Energies Marines and Ifremer, Brest

Florian left his native Jura in 2014 to enter a mathematics preparatory class at the Carnot high school in Dijon, then the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace in Toulouse. In this context, he did his first internship in a Parisian start-up where he helped study the feasibility of a marine air-conditioning system (or SWAC) for Kingston airport in Jamaica. It was this experience that gave him a taste for MRE. The following year, Florian left for Hamburg in Germany where he did an internship at Airbus. Passionate about research, in 2019 he embarked on a master’s degree in mechanics with an internship at the Ifremer Centre in Brest where he worked on impact models. Then, in January 2021, he will be offered a thesis by France Energies Marines and Ifremer as part of the DIMPACT project. This is a great opportunity for him to combine research work on ORE with the possibility of sailing regularly! His doctorate is focused on basin tests designed to characterise the hydrodynamic loads induced by wave impacts on floating wind turbines. Florian is first using a digital tank to simulate different wave cases in silico and to follow them in time and space. This will be followed by tests on a cylinder in Ifremer’s test tank. The results obtained will be used to feed the numerical models developed by Marc and Paul.  After his thesis, Florian would like to do a post-doctorate in marine hydrodynamics.

Rui DUARTE
France Energies Marines, Brest

His university studies in physical oceanography began in Portugal and ended with a DEA at the University of Western Brittany (UBO). Rui then worked on several research engineering contracts in the Azores, then in France, notably at the Laboratoire de Physique des Océans at UBO, at Shom and at Actimar. In 2016, he joined France Energies Marines to work on the European DTOcean project, which aims to develop design tools for ocean energy recovery systems. He is in charge of compiling, formatting and putting online the documentation transmitted by the developers of the different modules of the eponymous software suite. He also participates in the development of the module dedicated to the evaluation of the environmental impacts of tidal and wave farms. In 2017, he took over the coordination of three projects dealing with the evaluation of the tidal resource: HYD2M, PHYSIC and THYMOTE. In parallel, he is strongly involved in the scientific part of the DIME project which deals with the modelling and observation of extreme breaking sea states. Rui is working on a wave crest detection algorithm and oversees the second winter measurement campaign on La Jument lighthouse, off Ushant Island. In 2018, Rui actively participates in the preparation of the European project DTOceanPlus and then supports the team members who develop the modules of the new version of the software suite. In 2019, he takes the scientific co-leadership of the ANODE project where he brings his expertise on marine currents to model the dispersion fluxes of metals released in the environment. Rui is still very involved in the DIME and DIMPACT projects dealing with surfing. For installation on Zefyros, a floating wind turbine off Norway, he is managing the development of a system for acquiring the pressure sensor data that will be collected during this high-flying operation. In 2021, Rui is also very active on the service side, participating, with Fabien, in a study on waves and marine submersion on the Grande Plage in Biarritz, and initiating an evaluation of the wave potential in Brittany’s ports. The stereo video system he developed for the Biarritz study, which is more reliable and economical, will be deployed on the La Jument lighthouse in early 2022. While the diversity of the tasks he has been given is a positive point, the most important thing is the good working atmosphere within the project team.

Fabien LECKLER
France Energies Marines, Brest

Fabien began his studies in physics at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, then went on to do a master’s degree in oceanography in Bordeaux. His second-year internship brought him to Brest, within the engineering firm SAFEGE, where his work focused on coupled wave-atmosphere numerical simulations. From 2010 to 2013, he completed a PhD at the Laboratoire d’océanographie physique et spatiale of Ifremer on the observation and modelling of wave breaking. During this time, he developed expertise in the deployment of stereoscopic systems and 3D wave reconstruction. Fabien then joined the Shom where, for six years, he took part in various studies on a wide range of subjects: extreme run-up at Bannec (off the coast of Finistère), extreme sea states applied to ORE as part of the DIME project, development of the French wave-submersible vigilance system, sites for future offshore wind farms, but also for the surfing events of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games… In search of a position with a larger research component, he applied to France Energies Marines where he was recruited, in early 2020, as a research executive on the modelling and observation of coastal sea states. Fabien was then heavily involved in the DIME and DIMPACT projects, working on the parameterisation of wave breaking and the impact of breakers on offshore structures. He was also mission leader for the operation to instrument Zefyros, a floating wind turbine off Norway. At the same time, he is actively contributing to the set-up and scientific tasks of the CASSIOWPE project on the characterisation of interactions between the atmosphere and the sea surface in the Gulf of Lion. Because of his expertise in wave modelling, Fabien is part of the international team developing WAVEWATCH III®, a recognised and proven numerical tool for calculating the evolution in time and space of the energy of the various components of the wave spectrum. In 2021, Fabien and Rui will carry out a research project on the study of the risks of marine submersion on the Grande Plage in Biarritz. So, whether it’s science or surfing, Fabien is a wave enthusiast who is fully committed to the various missions he is offered.

Photo credit: France Energies Marines