DNV GL has launched a new joint industry project with fourteen global partners to develop a Recommended Practice for the coupled analysis of floating offshore wind turbines. The project is the first of its kind, bringing together multiple stakeholders from the wind, oil & gas and maritime industries.
Despite the fact that the wind industry has a strong focus on the development of floating offshore wind turbines, a widely recognized and unified approach for the practical methods to build and validate the numerical models is still missing. Guidance includes setting up minimum requirements for the design of new concepts. Such concepts are needed to help investors evaluate projects and to support the more mature technologies towards a safe and secure commercialization.
The project is the first of its kind, bringing together multiple stakeholders from a broad range of industries, including utilities, component manufacturing, engineering consultants, maritime research institutes, shipyards and academic research. According to DNV GL it is the most interdisciplinary project that engages in the technical advancement for floating offshore wind projects to date.
The new Recommended Practice will build on the experience from the application of the Offshore Standard DNV-OS-J103 “Design of Floating Wind Turbine Structures“ which was published in 2013 and will contain methods and ways to fulfil the requirements set in DNV-OS-J103.
Since its publication, the offshore standard DNV-OS-J103 has been broadly used for the design of floating wind turbine structures. At the time of publication, the practical experiences in the field of floating offshore wind energy have been rather limited in providing reliable information on validating numerical models for turbine construction. Over the past three years, the industry has greatly advanced towards the commercialisation of the new technology, as the world’s first floating wind farm demonstration projects have since been launched.
Reduction of risks, time savings and a unified cost structure
Based on the latest knowledge and practical know-how, the joint approach will greatly reduce the risk of inadequate analysis and allow for substantial time savings. The coherent structure of the Recommended Practice also provides a unified cost structure for the project development process.
Luca Vita, Project Manager of the Joint Industry Project and Senior Engineer at DNV GL – Energy, Renewables Certification commented: “The analysis of floating wind turbines is a complex challenge that requires the integration of different technologies and disciplines. The lack of a common agreement on the optimal approach to conduct these analyses during the different stages of the design process adds potential risk factors and time delays in the project development, but also in the cost evaluation of new conceptual designs. This project provides a unique platform to mutually develop an invaluable Recommended Practice which will be beneficial to each industry stakeholder, taking the wide-ranging spectrum of interdisciplinary skills and business objectives of each participant into account.”
Buddensiek / DNV GL
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