Optimizing Shared Mooring And Anchoring Strength For Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Arrays

Project Motivation

Floating offshore wind installations have great potential for energy generation in deep water where driven monopile turbines aren’t feasible. However, floating offshore wind’s financial viability remains tenuous and would benefit from design optimization. One way to decrease the cost is to connect mooring lines from multiple turbines to a single anchor, but the dynamics of this kind of system are complex and decrease the reliability of the components of the wind array. This project set out to analyze how strengthening a small number of important anchors significantly more than the rest might optimize floating wind systems by improving reliability while limiting installation costs.

Summary

The project sought to identify the best anchors to strengthen in a specific shared anchoring scheme to maximize system reliability. An optimization algorithm was developed and optimal anchors were identified for systems with 3, 10, and 30 anchors with increased strength.

layout windoptimization — Layout of the theoretical shared anchoring scheme, with circles denoting anchors, triangles denoting turbine platforms, and lines denoting mooring lines.

Current Results

The project resulted in a small set of optimal anchors in the shared anchoring array, as well as information about the resulting system reliability. The results show the promise of competitive system reliabilities for increasing the strength of more than 30 anchors.