ISLINGTON · Improved SoiL-cable Interaction mooriNG simulaTiONs

Improved SoiL-cable Interaction mooriNG simulaTiONs

Mooring is a vital sub-system for marine renewables. In the oil and gas (O&G) industry there is a large degree of redundancy in the design to account for uncertainties. It is unlikely that marine renewables - in order to obtain a competitive levelised cost of energy (LCOE) can afford such redundancy in the mooring design. ISLINGTON had the overall objective to reduce uncertainties in estimated fatigue damage of mooring cables due to soil-cable interaction in the touch down zone (TDZ); and subsequently lower the economic cost of mooring systems for marine renewables. To achieve this objective, the following research actions have been carried out: 1) Improving the numerical modelling of the cable-soil interaction in the TDZ for mooring cables by allowing for time-dependent granular soil dynamics. Application Programming Interface (API) inside a granular particle soil solver was developed to allow a two-way coupling to a mooring cable solver providing position and motion of the mooring cable. 2) Experimental data was generation for mooring line trenching to be used for validation. This was done by forced oscillations of a cable in a wave flume with sandy bottom and log the development of the trenching under different forcing. 3) Numerical investigation of the effect of trenching on fatigue of mooring cables. The work carried out during the ISLINGTON project, although it does not generate a direct market opportunity, it provides a first step to reducing the uncertainty of mooring design of offshore floating structures. This research has the potential to contribute to the competitiveness and growth of the floating offshore wind sector reducing the LCOE through improved numerical simulation tools for the design phase. The results of the projects can be exploited in two ways: on one hand, universities can use the project results to further advance the state-of-the-art of granular soil modelling enabling multidisciplinary approaches from a hydrodynamics and geotechnical point of view. On the other hand, technology developers, due to the open release of the API and the experimental dataset can implement the proposed novel approach into their numerical tools, or validate their own developments.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз