Wood Thilsted uses FEA software with automation capabilities to develop long-lasting boat landings more efficiently, saving on materials, cost and time.
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Designing boat landings for offshore wind turbines involves accounting for heavy waves, the impact of 200-tonne maintenance vessels, worker safety and longevity. As a result, boat landings need to be strong, but building up strength is not as simple as adding steel: adding material to pieces without the right information to guide decisions would add unnecessary cost to the project.
To this end, Wood Thilsted, a leading engineering consultancy firm specialising in offshore wind energy projects, incorporates structural analysis with automation into their design process. The team's lean workflow for creating, testing and validating designs is what allows them to turn around new boat landing designs in just a couple of months – and feel confident that they will last for 30 years.
A vessel landing at a wind turbine terminal.
Boat landings consist of ladders, fenders, pins and many other components, all of which need to be designed and tested in concert. "The challenge with the design is that we have a set of requirements with different load cases, and these are contradicting. I can spend a lot of time optimising one aspect of the design and then figure out that it does not work for another design case," said Louise Bendtsen, senior structural engineer at Wood Thilsted. "As a designer, this means that you need to have a broader perspective on the design as a whole."
The COMSOL Multiphysics® software helps Wood Thilsted take a holistic approach to evaluating the performance of its offshore boat landing designs.
The design team uses this FEA software to model the governing load cases of any potential solution: the ultimate limit state (ULS) wave, representing the maximum peak forces that a boat landing is expected to experience throughout its projected lifespan, and the fatigue limit state (FLS) wave, representing the cumulative impact of 30 years of waves and crew transfers.
Simulation results visualising points of strain in a boat landing design (left) and custom model parts that can be reused in different projects (right).
"We are using COMSOL® to quickly and easily calculate what the stress concentration factors (SCFs) of our boat landings are and keep track of that throughout a project," said Bendtsen.
To further validate potential designs, her team collaborates with Wood Thilsted's Primary Steel team for feedback on the SCFs and the limits of the materials being used. To automate processes such as applying loads, setting material properties, and choosing the analysis type, the team links the COMSOL Multiphysics software with the MATLAB® software.
Wood Thilsted's efficient boat landing design process is discussed in further detail in the COMSOL User Story Gallery.
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