Van Oord partners on foundation design optimisation

Dutch company Van Oord is working with US company Ansys to speed environmental sustainability while expediting new foundation designs for the offshore wind industry.

Van Oord said designing foundations typically requires its engineers to invest considerable time developing numerous complex, dynamic analysis finite element models.

To accelerate and optimise the simulation process, Van Oord's engineering team is now working with Ansys' partner Infinite Simulation Systems to harness Ansys Mechanical and Ansys Cloud.

The technologies have spurred design optimisation, shortened product development timelines and boosted the efficiency of next-gen offshore wind turbines, the partners said.

“Leveraging Mechanical and Ansys Cloud empowers Van Oord engineers to rapidly run 5x more design iterations on Cloud to predict the performance of advanced wind turbine foundations and enhance the fabrication processes while reducing project risks and speeding supply chain negotiations,” they said.

“As a result, simulations that required a week to run on multiple costly workstations now run overnight, delivering a 7x improvement in time savings, while greatly decreasing risk of production delay,” they added.

Van Oord engineering specialist Ralph Luiken said: “Van Oord engineers employ Ansys Cloud to spur new product innovation and solve the ever-growing number of Mechanical models, which may feature over 5.5 million degrees of freedom, 1.8 million nodes and 550,000 elements.

“Historically, these massive models each required 150 hours to run, however, with Ansys Cloud, our team has reduced run times to less than 24 hours per simulation.

“This has substantially sped up product development, enabled us to expediate our negotiations with foundation steel suppliers and expedited delivery to our global customers.”

Ansys senior vice president Shane Emswiler said: “Ansys is proud to join forces with Van Oord engineers to fast-track their R&D efforts and help achieve their sustainability goals by creating highly efficient offshore wind turbine foundations that deliver renewable energy to millions of households worldwide.

“Ansys Cloud is built specifically for our flagship solvers, powering push-button access to Microsoft Azure Cloud computing resources.

“This significantly speeds up the wind turbine foundation design and analysis process for Van Oord engineers, equipping them to improve the production efficiency of new products and elevate offshore wind energy to greater heights.”