The European offshore wind industry increasingly needs new production and installation methods to remain competitive and reduce its climate impact. The current joining methods require high amounts of manual labour and material.
Objective
Current welded joints require 30,000-50,000 hours of manual labour per jacket, drive excessive steel use, and limit fatigue performance. The objective is to replace welds with prefabricated composite joints. This enables 200% higher production throughput, 30 – 50% steel reduction, up to 35% CO₂ savings, and improved safety by eliminating most hazardous welding tasks.
The partners will design, prototype, and integrate a scalable pilot production line. The automated manufacturing line for composite X-joints for offshore wind jacket foundations will be located at Tree Composites. During the development process, representative X-joints will be manufactured and validated through static and fatigue testing. Sustainability assessments and techno-economic analyses will benchmark the technology against state-of-the-art welded jackets and floaters.
Focus areas
JOIN2SCALE focuses on several aspects:
- Developing an innovative composite process
- Increasing the quality and durability of jacket foundations
- Designing a flexible process that can be easily integrated in existing yards and workshops
- Decreasing manufacturing time by smart advanced manufacturing
- Decreasing the manufacturing footprint by using a non-traditional material and joing technique
- Improving workers’ health and safety conditions
- Realising a fully EU-souced manufacturing process.
The associated partners cover a wide range expertise, amongst others on materials, automation, non destructive testing (NDT), sustainability, and end-users. SAM XL is involved in creating smart, autonomous robotic processes for manufacturing and quality control. This innovative technology is based on aerospace automatized advanced composite manufacturing.
Phasing
Phase 1: X-joint pilot line (2026-2029)
Phase 2: Upgrade production line to make complex joint geometries (2029-2030)
Phase 3: Multi-line expansion for one wind farm (2030–2032)
Funding
This project is funded by the European Union, under the Horizon Europe Funding Programme.
More information
You can follow the JOIN2SCALE LinkedIn page for regular updates on the project.
