Aquaculture is currently the fastest growing food sector in the world and the open oceans are seen as one of the most likely areas for large-scale expansion [1], [2], [3]. The global demand for seafood is continuing to rise sharply, driven by both population growth and increased per capita consumption, whilst wild-capture fisheries are constrained in their potential to produce more seafood. A recently funded EC project, the Blue Growth Farm – BGF (GA n. 774426, 1st June 2018 – 30th September 2021) aims at contributing to this world need with an original solution. The Blue Growth Farm proposes an efficient, cost-competitive and environmentally friendly multi-purpose offshore farm concept. It is based on a modular floating structure, moored to the seabed, meeting requirements of efficiency, cost-competitiveness and environmental friendless, where automated aquaculture and renewable energy production systems are integrated and engineered for profitable applications in the open sea. In the present paper, the overall engineering approach developed to carry out the research work is presented, described and justified. Different technical and scientific challenges are addressed through an integrated industrial engineering design approach, where all disciplines are tuned to achieve the Blue Growth Farm main targets. These are represented by: i) guaranteeing expected nominal fish production thanks to advanced automation and remote control capabilities; ii) minimizing the pollution introduced at marine ecosystem level when exploiting the marine natural resources, whilst increasing the social acceptance and users community agreement; iii) maximizing the electricity production in the Blue Growth Farm potential installation area ecosystem to provide energy supply to the on-board electrical equipment and to dispatch the extra produced electric energy to the land network. Preliminary engineering design results are promising to demonstrate effective increase of safety and efficiency by reducing on-board human effort and consequently risks at offshore, thus to make commercial-scale open ocean farming a reality. The present paper introduces overall concepts and design methodology whilst other companion works submitted at OMAE2019 [4], [5], [6] provide insight of specific aspects of the Blue Growth Farm project elaborated during the first six months activity.

A multi-purpose platform (MPP) is an offshore system designed to serve the purposes of more than one offshore industry. Indeed, over the past decades, a number of industries have expanded, or are expanding, from onshore to offshore locations (renewables, aquaculture, tourism, mineral extractions, etc), and the research on these type of platform is increasing. In the present work, a MPP able to accommodate wind turbines, wave energy converters, and aquaculture systems is considered. For an overview of the MPP platform considered and its research context, please refer to the EU H2020 project overview (OMAE 2019-96104). This work presents the second part (Part B) of the analyses of the dynamics of the floating support structure for this MPP, focusing on the hydro-elastic analysis, while its complementary rigid-body hydrodynamic analysis is presented in Part A (OMAE2019-96212). The aim here is to assess if the support platform structural elasticity has a substantial impact on the dynamic response of the platform. A beam model and a 3D solid model of the support structure have been developed, and the inertial forces, hydrodynamic added mass forces, hydrostatic and mooring restoring forces have been considered in the hydro-elastic analyses performed. The results show that the dynamic response to the wave loads is not substantially influenced by the elasticity of the support structure, and that, at first approximation, a rigid-body approach is acceptable.