The German government has decided upon the changeover from fossil and nuclear based electrical power generation to renewable energies. Following from this offshore wind farms are erected in the exclusive economic zones of Germany. For the transportation and installation as well as the maintenance of the wind turbine generators very specialized vessels are needed. The capability of dynamic positioning even in very harsh weather conditions is one of the major design tasks for these vessels. For this reason it is important to know the external loads on the ships during station keeping already in the very early design stage. This paper focuses on the computation of wave drift forces in regular and irregular waves as well as in natural seaway. For validation the results of the introduced calculation procedure are compared to measured drift force data from sea-keeping tests of an Offshore Wind Farm Transport and Installation Vessel.
Offshore wind farms are not planned in sheltered and shallow waters any longer. Especially in the North Sea there exist many approved offshore wind farm projects at water depth between 30 and 50 meters. In particular the installation process of these projects is strongly influenced by weather conditions and the sea-keeping capabilities of the installation vessels. For reliable planning of the entire project, not only the weather statistics, but also the vessel's sea-keeping capabilities need to be known accurately. For this purpose different kinds of sea-keeping analyses can be conducted. In this paper a sea-keeping analysis is presented, where the focus is upon the jack-up process. For the numerical computation the sea-keeping code E4ROLLS is applied. The results of this sea-keeping analysis are operational limitations for the jack-up process, caused by two different criteria derived from jack-up classification requirements.
Vessels equipped with a Dynamic Positioning (DP) system for station keeping have become quite common on the offshore market. The propulsion system of such ships has the capability to compensate the counteracting environmental forces caused by wind, waves and current. Since the DP capability is an important part of the specification, it is necessary to consider this aspect in the early ship design stage. For this purpose a procedure of a fast calculation method is developed by the authors to predict the limiting environmental conditions and the maximum deviation of the position and the course angle for a pre-established propulsion system.
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