Crew transfer vessels are a fast and cost-effective means of transportation to bring service personnel and technical equipment to an offshore wind turbine. The landing manoeuvre of such service vessels is a complex coupled process involving the ship's motion in the seaway and the frictional contact between the fender and the boat landing. With the help of numerical simulations, we aim to identify the limit conditions under which a safe crew transfer can still be ensured, and to investigate innovative transfer concepts which serve to avoid severe accidents. In our research, we draw on a partitioned solution strategy which has already been successfully applied to other sophisticated multi-field phenomena and which allows to reuse specialised existing solvers for the solution of the involved subproblems.
In this work, the landing manoeuvre of a catamaran vessel at a monopile foundation is investigated by experiments compared with numerical simulations. Therefore, a method is presented which allows simulating the described landing manoeuvre at offshore structures. The simulation in the time domain is based on potential theory using a boundary element method (BEM) and it computes the motions of the rigid body due to the hydrodynamic loads which consist of the incoming waves and the diffraction caused by the monopile. Further, a fender model is implemented, considering the reaction forces due to the friction and the deformation of the fender. The model is further able to distinguish between slip and non-slip condition of the fender. Apart from this, model tests of the landing manoeuvre were carried out with a catamaran model. During the tests the model pushed its fender against an equally scaled monopile. The motions of the vessel and the forces at the attachment of the fender were measured in regular and irregular waves. The obtained data which leads to a better understanding of the hydrodynamic effects during a landing manoeuvre is compared with the simulation results in order to improve the numerical method. The validation with experimental results shows that the method is applicable to quantify the risk of the fender suddenly slipping.
In this paper an existing time domain panel method, which was originally developed for propeller flow simulations, is extended by implementing the mixed Eulerian-Lagrangian approach for the computation of the non-linear free water surface. The three-dimensional panel method uses a constant source and doublet density distribution on each panel and a Dirichlet boundary condition to solve the velocity potential in every time step. Additionally, a formulation for the acceleration potential is included in order to determine the hydrodynamic forces accurately. The paper gives an overview on the governing equations and introduces the numerical approach. Validation results of the developed method are presented for the wave resistance of a submerged spheroid and a wigley hull. Additionally, the wave diffraction due to a surface piercing cylinder in regular waves is validated regarding the forces and the water surface elevation around the body. Here, the computations are compared with other numerical methods as well as tank test results. Apart from this, the paper deals with an application example showing simulations of an artificial service vessel catamaran in waves. The forces on the hull with and without forward speed are presented. The paper concludes with a discussion of the presented results and a brief outlook on further work.
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