Simulation of Safety-Relevant Situations Regarding the Interaction of Service Ships With Offshore Wind Turbine Plants

Abstract

When offshore wind turbine plants require servicing, crew transfer vessels are used to bring the maintenance personnel to the plant. The berthing maneuver is a coupled process governed by the ship’s motion in the swell and the contact between the fender and the boat landing. Our research aims to simulate the berthing maneuver in order to identify conditions to ensure safe landing operations and to ascertain how future transfer concepts can help to avoid severe accidents. To this end, we take advantage of a partitioned solution approach which has already been proven to be effective for various kinds of multiphysics problems and which allows for the reuse of existing dedicated solvers for the solution of the subproblems involved.