Offshore staff
LEIDSCHENDAM, the Netherlands – A Fugro-led consortium, including AS Mosley and the University of Strathclyde in central Scotland, has designed a mooring line fatigue tracker to monitor offshore floating wind turbines.
The consortium attracted funding in March 2020 from the Scottish government to develop the tracker, which combines motion and position measurements of floating hulls with a simulation model to monitor fatigue.
The program was approved by the Floating Offshore Wind Technology Acceleration Competition organized by the Carbon Trust’s Floating Wind Joint Industry Project.
Fugro and its partners have demonstrated the technology and are now seeking to work with floating wind developers to trial the solution offshore.
The consortium, drawing on Fugro’s satellite positioning, structural and metocean monitoring systems, created a physics-based simulation model with fatigue analysis for their methodology.
Their aim is to replace the current five-year conventional subsea inspection regime with a system under which mooring line fatigue is tracked so that inspection activities – requiring vessels and ROVs – are performed only when necessary.
Monitoring would also be continuous and could be used to detect problems or failure scenarios such as anchor drag or trawler snagging.
06/14/2021
