Field experimental campaign on a multi-purpose floating structure: set-up description

This paper presents the set-up of a field experimental activity on a 1:15 outdoor scaled prototype of a novel multi-purpose floating platform concept, aimed to investigate its dynamics and to demonstrate its functions. The campaign was carried out between March 2021 and January 2022 at the sea Natural Ocean Engineering Laboratory (NOEL) of Reggio Calabria (Italy). The full-scale infrastructure architecture, developed within “The Blue Growth Farm” H2020 project (GA 774426), is devoted to combined offshore aquaculture and renewable energy harvesting systems. The structure prototype was tested under several configurations, to investigate in detail its uncoupled and coupled dynamics. The considerable amount of data collected during the experimental and demonstration activities contributed to the technical feasibility study of the proposed concept.