ATLANTIS | DE FOA 0002051

Opportunity Information: Apply for DE FOA 0002051

ATLANTIS (Aerodynamic Turbines, Lighter and Afloat, with Nautical Technologies and Integrated Servo-Control) is a research and development funding opportunity from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). ARPA-E was created to help the United States strengthen energy and economic security by pushing forward high-impact energy technologies that are still too early or too risky for typical private-sector investment. In practice, that means ARPA-E backs ideas that can make a meaningful technical leap within a defined project period and a relatively modest budget, with the intent of moving concepts from promising science toward early-stage technology that can later be commercialized. Awards under this opportunity are issued as cooperative agreements, which generally implies active program involvement by the government compared to more hands-off grant mechanisms.

The core goal of ATLANTIS is to open new technical pathways for floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) that can compete economically with other energy sources. Floating offshore wind is attractive because it can access stronger and steadier winds in deeper waters where fixed-bottom turbines are not feasible, but it also faces major engineering and cost challenges due to platform motion, harsh marine environments, structural loads, and complex interactions among the rotor, tower, floating platform, mooring system, and control systems. ATLANTIS is aimed at reducing the cost of energy from floating offshore wind by rethinking turbine and platform design in a way that makes the entire system lighter, more efficient, and better controlled.

A defining feature of the program is its emphasis on Control Co-Design (CCD). Instead of designing the mechanical structure first and then adding control systems later, CCD requires teams to design the physical system and the control strategy together from the very beginning. The logic is that floating turbines behave as tightly coupled dynamic systems: aerodynamic forces, wave and current excitation, platform pitch and roll, structural flexibility, generator and drivetrain dynamics, and control actions all feed back into one another. By treating controls as a primary design variable rather than an afterthought, the program expects teams to find solutions that would be hard to discover through traditional sequential engineering. This includes control solutions that can reduce structural loads, enable lighter structures, maintain power production under motion, and expand the feasible design space for novel floating concepts.

ATLANTIS also introduces a specific way to define and compare design improvements. It frames design optimization as maximizing swept rotor area per unit total system mass (m2/kg) for a given power-generation efficiency, effectively pushing teams toward lighter systems that still capture a lot of wind energy. Alongside this, the program describes a "metric space" that combines this specific area-per-mass metric with air-to-electron efficiency (how effectively energy in the wind is converted into electrical output). Using these metrics, the program aims to help researchers navigate tradeoffs that ultimately affect levelized cost of energy (LCOE), focusing attention on Pareto-optimal designs where improving one attribute cannot be done without sacrificing another.

The research scope is organized around three main technical thrusts. First, the program seeks radically new floating offshore wind turbine designs that substantially reduce mass relative to rotor swept area, which could involve new structural concepts, materials, platform configurations, or integrated turbine-platform approaches. Second, it calls for a new generation of modeling and simulation tools specifically built to support control co-design, meaning tools that can capture the coupled dynamics of FOWT subsystems and allow designers to explore control-structure tradeoffs early and systematically. Third, it requires generation of real-world data from both laboratory-scale and full-scale experiments to validate the designs and the new computational tools, helping ensure that proposed improvements are not just theoretical but grounded in measured performance.

ATLANTIS is structured in two phases. Phase I, covered by the described funding announcement, was planned as a two-year effort with an anticipated total of about $28 million spread across multiple projects. A Phase II was described as a tentative follow-on, also expected to last about two years and dependent on future appropriations, with added funding to continue work across the same three thrust areas and a stronger emphasis on experimental testing and validation. In other words, early work is expected to focus heavily on design and tool development, while later work would increasingly prove performance through testing.

In terms of funding logistics and basic eligibility, the opportunity (Funding Opportunity Number DE-FOA-0002051) was listed under DOE/ARPA-E with the assistance listing number 81.135, and it was open to a broad range of applicant types (unrestricted eligibility, subject to any specifics in the full announcement). The mechanism is a cooperative agreement, with an award ceiling listed at $10,000,000 and an expectation of around 10 awards. The original timeline in the posting indicated concept papers due March 18, 2019, with applicants encouraged to submit ahead of the deadline to avoid last-minute issues. Overall, ATLANTIS is best understood as an ARPA-E push to make floating offshore wind cheaper and more scalable by co-optimizing turbine/platform hardware and advanced control from the outset, supported by new design tools and experimental validation.

• The Department of Energy, Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "ATLANTIS" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 81.135.
• This funding opportunity was created on Jan 31, 2019.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Mar 18, 2019 Concept papers are due by 3/18/2019. Applicants are strongly encouraged to submit their applications at least 48 hours in advance of the submission deadline.. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $10,000,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 10 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Unrestricted (i.e., open to any type of entity above), subject to any clarification in text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility.

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