Offshore Wind Installation Vessels

Offshore Wind Installation Vessels: Generating insight about the driving factors behind the future design

van Lynden, Casper (TU Delft Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering)

Hekkenberg, R.G. (mentor)
Kana, A.A. (mentor)
Polinder, H. (graduation committee)
Rezaei, J. (graduation committee)
van Winsen, I. (mentor)
Westland, C.N. (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

Marine Technology | Ship Design, Production and Operations

2021-07-13

Offshore wind plays a major role in the transition of conventional energy towards sustainable energy sources. To keep up with the increasing installation demand in this sector new offshore wind installation vessels are needed. There is a need for more certainty and predictability regarding the requirements of the future offshore wind installation vessels. To translate the market developments towards input variables for future vessel concept designs, the methods ’needs analysis’ and ’concept exploration’ from the systems engineering framework are applied. Epoch-era analysis is selected as scenario modelling method to capture the uncertain and the fast changing market by generating various future possibilities each posing different vessel requirements. A parametric model is created to determine the performance of a set of vessels defined by their length, beam, depth, crane capacity, speed, and transport strategy.
The case study shows that the application of Epoch-era analysis and parametric modelling is capable of generating insights in important aspects for designing future offshore wind installation vessels. The strength of this method is that it has the flexibility to select different key performance indicators but also provides the opportunity to incorporate the importance of short term against long term goals. It can therefore be tailor-made to a stakeholders strategy. Applying their wishes while analysing many different options results in robust input variables for the concept vessel design.

Offshore Wind Installation Vessels
Epoch-era analysis
Parametric modelling

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:e7d96aa8-bd14-4446-8e78-1d388133c106

Student theses

master thesis

© 2021 Casper van Lynden