Offshore wind engineering firm automates design process with simulation

Burlington, MA, Sept. 03, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Designing boat landing areas for offshore wind turbines requires consideration of large waves, the impact of 200-ton maintenance vessels, worker safety, and durability. As a result, boat landing areas must be strong, but building strength is not as simple as adding steel: adding material to components without the right information to guide decisions would add unnecessary project costs. To that end, Wood Thilsted, a leading engineering consulting firm specializing in offshore wind projects, is incorporating structural analysis with automation into its design process. The team’s streamlined workflow for design development, testing, and validation allows them to transform new boat landing area designs in just a few months—and with the confidence that they will last 30 years.

Boat ramps consist of ladders, fenders, pins and many other components that must be designed and tested in concert. “The challenge in design is that we have a set of requirements with different load cases, and they are conflicting. I can spend a lot of time optimizing one aspect of the design and then find that it doesn’t work in another design case,” says Louise Bendtsen, senior structural engineer at Wood Thilsted. “As a designer, you have to have a broader perspective on the project as a whole.”

COMSOL Multiphysics® software helps Wood Thilsted take a holistic approach to assessing the performance of offshore boat landing designs. The design team uses this FEA software to model the load cases that apply to each potential solution: a limit state (ULS) wave, representing the maximum peak forces that the boat landing is expected to experience over its design life, and a fatigue limit state (FLS) wave, representing the cumulative impact of 30 years of waves and crew transfers.

“We use COMSOL® to quickly and easily calculate the stress concentration factors (SCFs) of our boat landings and track them throughout the project,” Bendtsen said. To further validate potential designs, her team works with Wood Thilsted’s Primary Steel team to get feedback on the SCFs and limitations of the materials used. To automate processes such as applying loads, setting material properties and selecting the analysis type, the team combines COMSOL Multiphysics with MATLAB® software.

“With COMSOL Multiphysics, we automatically calculate stresses and then link this data to MATLAB using (COMSOL add-on product) LiveLink™ Down “MATLAB®,” Bendtsen said. “This allows us to write our own scripts that extract stresses and strains and perform all the evaluations for the different load cases, freeing up time to refine the design and focus on the difficult parts of it.”

Collecting and storing information about individual parts means the team can optimize and automate simulations of normal wave loads as well as unexpected ship impacts. “The software offers a lot of automation capabilities, which is very beneficial for us because we have all these load cases that are similar but different,” Bendtsen said.

The library of custom geometric parts stored in COMSOL Multiphysics allows Wood Thilsted to take an efficient approach to design. By using the software’s ability to recreate the complex geometry of saved designs and make them parametric, the Wood Thilsted team is able to build new boat landing designs piece by piece, swapping one part of the design for another.

This approach also lets the team choose from multiple configurations for each part, allowing them to change joint types and angles, for example. By making changes to the appropriate global geometry parameter, the team can change many similar parts at once. As Bendtsen explains, “Our design teams are agile and fast. We can handle design changes in hours instead of weeks, creating the most steel-efficient designs at high speed.”

Wood Thilsted’s efficient boat landing design process is discussed in more detail in the COMSOL User Story Gallery: https://www.comsol.com/story/undocking-better-boat-landing-designs-for-offshore-wind-turbines-132091 .

About COMSOL

COMSOL (https://www.comsol.com/) is a global supplier of simulation software for product design and research for technical enterprises, research laboratories and universities. Its COMSOL Multiphysics ^® product is an integrated software environment for creating physics-based models and simulation applications. A particular advantage is the ability to consider coupled or multiphysics phenomena. Additional products extend the simulation platform for electromagnetic, structural, acoustic, fluid flow, heat transfer and chemical applications. Interface tools enable the integration of COMSOL Multiphysics simulations with all major computational and CAD tools in the CAE market. Simulation experts rely on COMSOL Compiler™ and COMSOL Server™ to implement applications in their design teams, production departments, test labs and customers worldwide. Founded in 1986, COMSOL has 16 offices worldwide and expands its reach through a network of distributors.

COMSOL, COMSOL Multiphysics, COMSOL Compiler, COMSOL Server, and LiveLink are registered trademarks or trademarks of COMSOL AB. MATLAB is a registered trademark of The MathWorks, Inc.

• Aerial view of a person wearing a hard hat climbing up the ladder of a boat dock with a vessel pressed against the bottom of the dock.
• Three-dimensional graph showing the results of the simulation of deformation of the boat landing structure on the left, and the designs of the custom mounting parts for the scoop and fender supports on the right.