Session: 09-02-02 Wind Energy: Mooring System II

Submission Number: 181358

Quasi-Static Design of Shared Mooring Systems for Floating Offshore Wind Farms 

The rapid growth of floating offshore wind farms (FOWFs) has brought new challenges to the design of mooring systems, where cost efficiency, reliability, and scalability are critical to ensuring commercial viability. Among the emerging solutions, shared mooring systems, in which multiple floating wind turbines are interconnected through common mooring lines, offer significant potential for reducing the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) by minimising material, installation, and maintenance costs. However, this concept remains in its early development stage. It continues to face a number of technical, operational, and economic challenges that must be addressed before large-scale deployment becomes feasible.

This study contributes to the baseline design and assessment of shared mooring systems for FOWFs within the framework of the ESOMOOR Project. The research begins with the validation of the in-house MoorPy code against the commercial software DNV SIMA to ensure consistency and reliability of the simulation results. Subsequently, a static analysis is conducted on 14 different multi-body configurations at two water depths, followed by quasi-static analyses incorporating combined wind and wave loading conditions. The investigation compares various multi-segment mooring layouts using fibre ropes, focusing on key performance indicators such as fairlead and anchor tensions, shared line loads, and the system’s mean offset.

Presenting Author: Shan Wang Instituto Superior Técnico

Presenting Author Biography: Dr. Shan Wang is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon. She received her PhD there in 2016, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, with her thesis awarded “Pass with Distinction and Honor.” Her research interests include ship slamming, Fluid and structure interaction, hydrodynamics of marine and offshore structures, and mooring design and analysis.
Dr. Wang serves on the editorial boards of Ocean Engineering, the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, and Marine Energy Research, and is an Associate Board Member of the Journal of Marine Science and Application. Her research has been supported by eight funded projects, including leadership of four FCT projects on CFD simulations of floating bodies and shared mooring systems (ESOMOOR), as well as contributions to EU projects such as EXTREME SEAS, ELASTMOOR, ARCWIND, and NATURSEA_PV.

Authors:

Marcus Vinicius Biroli Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering (CENTEC), Instituto Superior Técnico
Shan Wang Instituto Superior Técnico
Carlos Guedes Soares Instituto Superior Técnico