Offshore wind farm service vessel, hull design optimisation

Abstract

Access to a wind turbine is a major issue, currently there is a 1.5m significant wave height (Hs) limit for the standard “step over” method for transferring personnel to an offshore wind turbine. According to the Carbon Trust being able to access, wind turbines at a wave height of 3m would be worth ₤3 billion to the offshore wind industry. The current research addresses this issue by examining a novel multihull design concept for an Offshore Wind Farm Service Vessel. The objective of this work is to carry out a feasibility study of the proposed design as previous research indicated that the design reduces the heave and pitch motions by dampening its response to the wave motion. The proposed design is analysed with both hydrostatic and hydrodynamic analysis using the computational fluid dynamic (CFD) package ANSYS CFX. Also to be undertaken is physical model testing of the analysed design in the National Ocean Test Facility’s wave basin to determine the accuracy of the computational analysis.