China's independently developed 20-megawatt floating offshore wind turbine, the world's most powerful one so far, has rolled off the production line in Sheyang County of east China's Jiangsu Province, its developer CRRC Corporation Limited (CRRC) announced on Thursday.
With a propeller diameter of 260 meters, the wind turbine covers a sweeping area of 531,000 square meters, equivalent to seven standard soccer fields.
Capable of generating of 62 million Kwh of electricity in clean energy per year, a single unit of the wind turbine can satisfy the annual power consumption demand of around 37,000 households. This is equivalent to saving 25,000 tons of coals and cutting 62,000 tons of carbon dioxide emission each year.
Real-time monitoring of the wind turbine can be realized as it is equipped with multiple smart control and sensing technologies to ensure stable operation.
Located on a semi-submerged floating offshore wind platform, the floating offshore wind turbine could further utilize the wind power on the sea by allowing the deployment of wind turbines in larger and deeper offshore areas with higher wind potential.
"Traditional offshore wind turbines are based on structures fixed into the ocean floor, while floating wind turbines are given more leeway as they may drift with waves. Currently, floating wind power generation represents an important technological direction of the future of wind power development," said Wang Dian, deputy general manager of a CRRC's new energy technology subsidiary.
The floating wind turbine will be tested in Dongying City of east China's Bohai Sea coastal province of Shandong and will be installed later in a deep-sea area to be connected to the power grid , according to sources familiar with the project.
World's most powerful floating offshore wind turbine rolls off production line
Researchers from the Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology (CEBSIT) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have made new progress in invasive brain-computer interface clinical trials, with the second successful case involving a paralyzed patient.
According to the research team, the patient suffered a spinal cord injury in 2022 that resulted in high paraplegia. After more than a year of rehabilitation, only head and neck movement was possible. In June this year, the patient underwent implantation of a BCI system.
Following two to three weeks of training, the patient was able to control electronic devices such as a computer cursor and a tablet. To meet further needs, researchers expanded the application from two-dimensional digital screens to three-dimensional physical devices. An intelligent wheelchair and a robotic dog became new control targets.
This shift required the system to not only decode simple intentions such as "left" or "right," but also to deliver continuous, stable, and low-latency precise control to cope with complex real-world environments and interactive tasks.
According to an expert, as the patient became more proficient, the level of mental concentration required was significantly reduced.
"The experience is very close to how we normally control our own bodies. Once you are very skilled, it doesn't require much mental effort -- just like being able to chat while driving," said Zhao Zhengtuo, researcher from CEBSIT.
To achieve this, the team made multiple technical breakthroughs.
At the data source level, they developed high-compression, high-fidelity neural data compression technology and innovatively combined different compression methods. This allows effective information to be extracted efficiently even in noisy neural signal environments, improving overall brain-control performance by 15 to 20 percent.
The team also replaced traditional calibration methods with an "online recalibration" technology that silently and continuously fine-tunes decoding parameters in real time to maintain high system performance. Control speed has also been significantly improved, with intentions and actions now almost synchronized.
Notably, the research team has partnered with a local federation for persons with disabilities to enable the patient who can control a computer via the BCI to participate in online data annotation work, such as verifying the accuracy of AI recognition in vending machines. This makes the patient China's first paraplegic to earn income through labor using a brain-computer interface.
Researchers revealed that a third patient has now had a BCI implanted for nearly two months. Future applications will focus on more refined movements.
"[The next step is] to use the intention of finger movements to control robotic fingers to interact with the external world," said Poo Mu-ming, scientific director of CEBSIT, and also a CAS academician.
Chinese researchers complete 2nd successful case in invasive brain-computer interface trial in Shanghai
