WINDOPT: An Optimization Tool for Floating Support Structures for Deep Water Wind Turbines

Author(s):  
Ivar Fylling ◽  
Petter Andreas Berthelsen

An integrated design tool for optimization of a floating wind turbine support structure of the spar buoy type, including mooring system and power takeoff cable, is described in this paper. The program utilizes efficient design tools for analysis of mooring system forces and vessel motions, and combines this with a gradient method for solution of non-linear optimization problems with arbitrary constraints. The objective function to be minimized is the spar buoy cost, and the mooring line and cable costs. Typical design requirements that may be included as constraints are: mooring line load limitations and minimum fatigue life, cable curvature radius, cable tension, tower top acceleration, and vessel motion and inclination. The spar buoy is modelled as composed of a set of cylindrical sections with different mass, buoyancy and cost properties, where each section is assumed to have a uniform mass distribution. It is assumed that a representative initial cost figure is available, and that it can be scaled in proportion with material mass. A simple relationship between mass and geometrical properties is proposed for both massive and thin walled tubular sections. Examples are included to demonstrate the various aspects of the optimization approach, including different parameterizations of the spar buoy.

Author(s):  
David Cadrecha ◽  
Jose M. Chaquet ◽  
Roque Corral ◽  
Guillermo Pastor

An optimization method based on Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategies (CMA-ES) is applied on a parametric design tool for the automated generation of two-dimensional turbomachinery airfoil sections. Highly differentiable curves are managed to ensure continuity in the slope of the curvature on the blade surface to avoid undesired anomalies in the Mach number distributions. An Euler solver coupled with an integral boundary layer method is employed to assess the aerodynamic behavior of the geometries. Special care has been made defining several cost functions to allow the algorithm handle unfeasible geometries that can appear during the evolutionary process. The fitness function of feasible individuals can be set up to fulfill several geometric and aerodynamic constraints. To show the potential of the method, several optimization problems have been solved, tracing existing geometries originally defined in a point wise fashion, and applying inverse design to match target Mach number distributions. This method can facilitate the two-dimensional airfoil design and can be used to import external data defined with a set of points. This optimization approach could be employed as well to generate an initial blading geometry which could feed a more sophisticated optimization method based on a three-dimensional CFD solver.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Jinding Gao

In order to solve some function optimization problems, Population Dynamics Optimization Algorithm under Microbial Control in Contaminated Environment (PDO-MCCE) is proposed by adopting a population dynamics model with microbial treatment in a polluted environment. In this algorithm, individuals are automatically divided into normal populations and mutant populations. The number of individuals in each category is automatically calculated and adjusted according to the population dynamics model, it solves the problem of artificially determining the number of individuals. There are 7 operators in the algorithm, they realize the information exchange between individuals the information exchange within and between populations, the information diffusion of strong individuals and the transmission of environmental information are realized to individuals, the number of individuals are increased or decreased to ensure that the algorithm has global convergence. The periodic increase of the number of individuals in the mutant population can greatly increase the probability of the search jumping out of the local optimal solution trap. In the iterative calculation, the algorithm only deals with 3/500∼1/10 of the number of individual features at a time, the time complexity is reduced greatly. In order to assess the scalability, efficiency and robustness of the proposed algorithm, the experiments have been carried out on realistic, synthetic and random benchmarks with different dimensions. The test case shows that the PDO-MCCE algorithm has better performance and is suitable for solving some optimization problems with higher dimensions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Dongsheng Qiao ◽  
Binbin Li ◽  
Jun Yan ◽  
Yu Qin ◽  
Haizhi Liang ◽  
...  

During the long-term service condition, the mooring line of the deep-water floating platform may fail due to various reasons, such as overloading caused by an accidental condition or performance deterioration. Therefore, the safety performance under the transient responses process should be evaluated in advance, during the design phase. A series of time-domain numerical simulations for evaluating the performance changes of a Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) with different broken modes of mooring lines was carried out. The broken conditions include the single mooring line or two mooring lines failure under ipsilateral, opposite, and adjacent sides. The resulting transient and following steady-state responses of the vessel and the mooring line tensions were analyzed, and the corresponding influence mechanism was investigated. The accidental failure of a single or two mooring lines changes the watch circle of the vessel and the tension redistribution of the remaining mooring lines. The results indicated that the failure of mooring lines mainly influences the responses of sway, surge, and yaw, and the change rule is closely related to the stiffness and symmetry of the mooring system. The simulation results could give a profound understanding of the transient-effects influence process of mooring line failure, and the suggestions are given to account for the transient effects in the design of the mooring system.


Author(s):  
Will Brindley ◽  
Andrew P. Comley

In recent years a number of high profile mooring failures have emphasised the high risk nature of this element of a floating structure. Semi-submersible Mobile Offshore Drilling Units (MODUs) operating in the harsh North Sea environment have experienced approximately 3 mooring failures every 2 years, based on an average population of 34 units. In recognition of the high mooring failure rates, the HSE has introduced recommendations for more stringent mooring strength requirements for units operating on the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) [17]. Although strength requirements are useful to assess the suitability of a mooring design, they do not provide an insight into the question: what is the reliability of the mooring system? This paper aims to answer this question by evaluating failure statistics over the most recent decade of available data. Mooring failure rates are compared between the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS), the UKCS, and with industry code targets to understand how overall reliability is related to the strength capacity of a mooring system. The failure statistics suggest that a typical MODU operating in the UKCS would experience a mooring line failure in heavy weather approximately every 20 operating years. This failure rate appears to be several orders of magnitude greater than industry targets used to calibrate mooring codes. Despite the increased strength requirements for the NCS, failure rates do not appear to be lower than the UKCS. This suggests that reliability does not correlate well with mooring system strength. As a result, designing to meet the more rigorous HSE requirements, which would require extensive upgrades to existing units, may not significantly increase mooring system reliability. This conclusion needs to be supported with further investigation of failure statistics in both the UKCS and NCS. In general, work remains to find practical ways to further understand past failures and so improve overall reliability.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willemijn Pauw ◽  
Remco Hageman ◽  
Joris van den Berg ◽  
Pieter Aalberts ◽  
Hironori Yamaji ◽  
...  

Abstract Integrity of mooring system is of high importance in the offshore industry. In-service assessment of loads in the mooring lines is however very challenging. Direct monitoring of mooring line loads through load cells or inclinometers requires subsea installation work and continuous data transmission. Other solutions based on GPS and motion monitoring have been presented as solutions to overcome these limitations [1]. Monitoring solutions based on GPS and motion data provide good practical benefits, because monitoring can be conducted from accessible area. The procedure relies on accurate numerical models to model the relation between global motions and response of the mooring system. In this paper, validation of this monitoring approach for a single unit will be presented. The unit under consideration is a turret-moored unit operating in Australia. In-service measurements of motions, GPS and line tensions are available. A numerical time-domain model of the mooring system was created. This model was used to simulate mooring line tensions due to measured FPSO motions. Using the measured unit response avoids the uncertainty resulting from a prediction of the hydrodynamic response. Measurements from load cells in various mooring lines are available. These measurements were compared against the results obtained from the simulations for validation of the approach. Three different periods, comprising a total of five weeks of data, were examined in more detail. Two periods are mild weather conditions with different dominant wave directions. The third period features heavy weather conditions. In this paper, the data set and numerical model are presented. A comparison between the measured and numerically calculated mooring line forces will be presented. Differences between the calculated and measured forces are examined. This validation study has shown that in-service monitoring of mooring line loads through GPS and motion data provides a new opportunity for mooring integrity assessment with reduced monitoring system complexity.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rekha G ◽  
Krishna Reddy V ◽  
chandrashekar jatoth ◽  
Ugo Fiore

Abstract Class imbalance problems have attracted the research community but a few works have focused on feature selection with imbalanced datasets. To handle class imbalance problems, we developed a novel fitness function for feature selection using the chaotic salp swarm optimization algorithm, an efficient meta-heuristic optimization algorithm that has been successfully used in a wide range of optimization problems. This paper proposes an Adaboost algorithm with chaotic salp swarm optimization. The most discriminating features are selected using salp swarm optimization and Adaboost classifiers are thereafter trained on the features selected. Experiments show the ability of the proposed technique to find the optimal features with performance maximization of Adaboost.


Author(s):  
Sudhakar Y. Reddy

Abstract This paper describes HIDER, a methodology that enables detailed simulation models to be used during the early stages of system design. HIDER uses a machine learning approach to form abstract models from the detailed models. The abstract models are used for multiple-objective optimization to obtain sets of non-dominated designs. The tradeoffs between design and performance attributes in the non-dominated sets are used to interactively refine the design space. A prototype design tool has been developed to assist the designer in easily forming abstract models, flexibly defining optimization problems, and interactively exploring and refining the design space. To demonstrate the practical applicability of this approach, the paper presents results from the application of HIDER to the system-level design of a wheel loader. In this demonstration, complex simulation models for cycle time evaluation and stability analysis are used together for early-stage exploration of design space.


Author(s):  
Victor Oduguwa ◽  
Rajkumar Roy ◽  
Didier Farrugia

Most of the algorithmic engineering design optimisation approaches reported in the literature aims to find the best set of solutions within a quantitative (QT) search space of the given problem while ignoring related qualitative (QL) issues. These QL issues can be very important and by ignoring them in the optimisation search, can have expensive consequences especially for real world problems. This paper presents a new integrated design optimisation approach for QT and QL search space. The proposed solution approach is based on design of experiment methods and fuzzy logic principles for building the required QL models, and evolutionary multi-objective optimisation technique for solving the design problem. The proposed technique was applied to a two objectives rod rolling problem. The results obtained demonstrate that the proposed solution approach can be used to solve real world problems taking into account the related QL evaluation of the design problem.


Author(s):  
Gang Zou ◽  
Lei Wang ◽  
Feng Zhang

As the offshore industry is developing into deeper and deeper water, station keeping technics are becoming more and more important to the industry. Based on the dynamic positioning system, the thruster assisted mooring system (TAMS) is developed, which consisted of mooring lines and thrusters. The main function of the TAMS is to hold a structure against wind wave and current loads with its thruster and cables, which is mainly evaluated by the holding capacity of the system. The arrangement of the mooring lines (location of anchor or the mooring line angle relative to platform) will directly affect the TAMS holding capacity because of the influence of the directions of the mooring forces. So finding out an optimum arrangement of the mooring lines is essential since the performance of the TAMS depends greatly on the arrangement of the mooring lines. The TAMS of a semi-submersible platform, which is studied in this paper, consisted of eight mooring lines. By fixing the layout of the thrusters and changing the location of each mooring line for every case, the performances of the TAMS are analyzed. The platform motions, mooring line tensions and power consumptions are compared to obtain the optimum arrangement of mooring lines, and thus a thruster assisted mooring system with a better performance can be achieved. Time domain simulation is carried out in this paper to obtain the results.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahlem Aboud ◽  
Nizar Rokbani ◽  
Seyedali Mirjalili ◽  
Abdulrahman M. Qahtani ◽  
Omar Almutiry ◽  
...  

<p>Multifactorial Optimization (MFO) and Evolutionary Transfer Optimization (ETO) are new optimization challenging paradigms for which the multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization system (MOPSO) may be interesting despite limitations. MOPSO has been widely used in static/dynamic multi-objective optimization problems, while its potentials for multi-task optimization are not completely unveiled. This paper proposes a new Distributed Multifactorial Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (DMFPSO) for multi-task optimization. This new system has a distributed architecture on a set of sub-swarms that are dynamically constructed based on the number of optimization tasks affected by each particle skill factor. DMFPSO is designed to deal with the issues of handling convergence and diversity concepts separately. DMFPSO uses Beta function to provide two optimized profiles with a dynamic switching behaviour. The first profile, Beta-1, is used for the exploration which aims to explore the search space toward potential solutions, while the second Beta-2 function is used for convergence enhancement. This new system is tested on 36 benchmarks provided by the CEC’2021 Evolutionary Transfer Multi-Objective Optimization Competition. Comparatives with the state-of-the-art methods are done using the Inverted General Distance (IGD) and Mean Inverted General Distance (MIGD) metrics. Based on the MSS metric, this proposal has the best results on most tested problems.</p>


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