Development of Turret Mooring Systems (TMS) for harsh environment and large number of risers has led to a drastic increase of the size of the chaintable and consequently of the turret cylinder diameter. Furthermore, harsh environments usually require relatively deep drafts. As a consequence, the volume of entrapped water in large turrets increases to levels never designed for before. In some cases, the mass of the entrapped water can be comparable to the turret mass. Whilst this entrapped water does not exert any weight on the weathervaning system, its acceleration due to ship motions induces inertia loads which could affect the balance of loads. Estimation of these inertia loads is easily carried out assuming the entrapped water as frozen. However, to what extent is this assumption valid in view of the large amount of entrapped water involved and of the extreme ship motions expected in harsh environments? Should we expect sloshing of the entrapped water? In this paper, insights will be drawn from numerical techniques of diverse complexity. This will be preceded by a brief literature review on sloshing in moonpools. Practical analysis and design recommendations will be proposed. Operational aspects related to installation will be covered as well.
The objective of this paper is to present the design and performance of an offshore floating wind turbine support structure and associated station keeping system, for a commercial 6 MW turbine. The results reported in this paper are based on a joint desk study performed by SBM and IFPEN for the development of this new floating support structure concept. The proposed system has been extensively analyzed thanks to time domain simulation software. Time domain models incorporate the wind turbine, the station keeping system, as well as structural components of the floating foundation. The system’s behavior has been assessed for a variety of environment conditions and turbine conditions (operating, idling, fault), resulting in an extensive design load case table. In addition to the nominal system, a number of sensitivities have been investigated to test the system response to various effects: marine growth accumulation on the floating support structure, anchor position tolerance, variations of water level. Results produced during this study show the good performance of the proposed floating wind turbine support structure and components. The proposed arrangement is capable of sustaining 20 years of operation with environment conditions up to the 50-year return period. The motions of the floating support structure are beneficial for the turbine performance, with low inclinations and low nacelle accelerations. As a consequence of these floating support structure’s low motions, the floating offshore wind turbine production is only marginally lower than the production of the same turbine on a fixed offshore foundation in the same environment. Production can occur up to the 50-year joint environment conditions. The work presented in this paper formed part of a design dossier independently reviewed by a certification body to obtain an ‘Approval in Principle‘ for the development of the floating support structure. The study has shown that the floater motion characteristics allow similar turbine production levels to be achieved by a turbine on a fixed offshore foundation, providing support to move of floating offshore energy production.
When assessing the joint-probability of significant wave height and peak period, (Hs,Tp) measured over years at a given site, it is customary to fit a log-normal distribution to assess Tp dependence on Hs. The parameters of this distribution are then used either to compute N-year return period design curves in order to compute extreme response by means of short-term analysis, or response distributions, by means of response-based analysis. The main drawback of the Log-Normal distribution to represent the variability of Tp wrt. Hs is that its lower bound is zero, while physics tell us that wave steepness cannot be infinite, hence the lower bound, Tplim(Hs) should be greater than zero. If the distribution is kept unbounded, the resulting statistical fitting tends to predict occurrences of sea-states with (Hs,Tp) pairs having unphysical or unlikely steepness. This is particularly true in the range of 10–15s, where some ship-shaped units mooring systems responses are at their maximum. Attempts have been made in the past to introduce a lower bound to the log-normal distribution, for instance by Drago et al, [1], by shifting it by a predefined value of limit steepness. By doing so, some points of the original dataset had to be discarded as they were falling below the lower bound. An evolution of their methodology is proposed in this paper, which uses the points of the dataset in a relevant region which will be defined hereafter, and then uses this limit to shift the Log-Normal distribution. The obtained environmental contours are then compared against observed data to check which one fits most accurately the original set of measured (Hs,Tp) pairs.
After having relied for decades totally on small scale model tests, the design of anchoring systems for moored floaters like FPSOs is now widely performed numerically. Estimation of design maxima during mooring analyses requires calculating system response for a large number of sea states in order to screen all possible scenarios between wind, waves and current parameters. In addition, the slow-drift response motions of the system constituted by the floater and the anchoring system are highly dependent of the wave elevation realization, which is not an input parameter of the simulations and can lead to extremely variable responses. This is generally addressed by designers by performing the analysis for the same sea state and varying the wave group spectrum (or wave components phases) a large number of times N (20–50 realizations is a typical range, see Refs [4], [5]). For these N realizations, N response maxima are extracted, and a distribution of response extremes is derived, from which the response level is extracted. In terms of computational cost, performing N 3-hour simulations to derive N values of extreme response is extremely expensive. The paper will focus on methods that can be employed to reduce the computational cost of analyses. In a first step, the rapidity of statistical convergence of response estimates depending on the system will be investigated. This will allow pre-determining the number of sea states realizations required to reach a satisfactory convergence of response. In a second step, a mean of improving the computational efficiency of calculations carried-out to reach the statistical convergence will be proposed.
The reported presence of one third of remaining fossil reserves in the Arctic has sparked a lot of interest from energy companies. This has raised the necessity of developing specific engineering tools to design safely and accurately arctic-compliant offshore structures. The mooring system design of a turret-moored vessel in ice-infested waters is a clear example of such a key engineering tool. In the arctic region, a turret-moored vessel shall be designed to face many ice features: level ice, ice ridges or even icebergs. Regarding specifically level ice, a turret-moored vessel will tend to align her heading (to weather vane) with the ice sheet drift direction in order to decrease the mooring loads applied by this ice sheet. For a vessel already embedded in an ice sheet, a rapid change in the ice drift direction will suddenly increase the ice loads before the weathervaning occurs. This sudden increase in mooring loads may be a governing event for the turret-mooring system and should therefore be understood and simulated properly to ensure a safe design. The paper presents ADWICE (Advanced Weathervaning in ICE), an engineering tool dedicated to the calculation of the weathervaning of ship-shaped vessels in level ice. In ADWICE, the ice load formulation relies on the Croasdale model. Ice loads are calculated and applied to the vessel quasi-statically at each time step. The software also updates the hull waterline contour at each time step in order to calculate precisely the locations of contact between the hull and the ice sheet. Model tests of a turret-moored vessel have been performed in an ice basin. Validation of the simulated response is performed by comparison with model tests results in terms of weathervaning time, maximum mooring loads, and vessel motions.
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