Floating installation of wind turbine foundations

Floating installation of wind turbine foundations: An engineering assessment on Ship-Monopile Interaction during pile driving

Buitendijk, L.G.

Huijsmans, R.H.M. (mentor)

Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering

Marine and Transport Technology

Ship Hydromechanics

2016-12-13

Offshore wind turbines are growing significantly to become a cost-effective alternative for the offshore oil and gas market. This causes rapid growth of offshore wind turbine foundations (monopiles). Currently, monopiles are installed using jack-up vessels like Aeolus. However operations will be limited by crane capacity and its cost-effectiveness is subject to discussion. Therefore floating vessels are preferred for future monopile installation; although little is known about the interaction between ship and monopile during the pile driving process. This research focusses on the multi-body behaviour of a floating structure connected to a monopile which is partly penetrated in the seabed. Frequency domain calculations are performed in combination with spectral analyses to investigate floating monopile installation with HLV Svanen and a monohull concept. It is shown that the natural period of the multi-body system shifts towards the working conditions (wave period) of HLV Svanen. Therefore pile release is advised to avoid resonance during monopile installation. It is concluded that increasing scale of monopiles hardly affects the performance of HLV Svanen, while a monohull concept does not significantly improve the performance of floating monopile installation. However a new gripper design should be introduced to ensure structural integrity of the upscaling monopiles.

Monopile installation
Ship motions
Multi-body dynamics

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:e6118c08-5827-4bb1-9288-951ad1d0736c

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2016 Buitendijk, L.G.