Classification society ABS said it has updated its guides addressing both floating and bottom-founded offshore wind turbines.
The revised guides incorporate updated industry best practices and industry feedback, lessons learned from a range of projects in Europe and North America as well as latest developments in International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standards for offshore wind turbines.
“As the global market for offshore wind energy continues to grow, ABS has been involved in a range of industry-leading projects. These updated guides bring together all that experience to better support projects at a range of maturity stages, including concept design, prototype demonstration, pre-commercial wind farms and large utility-scale commercial wind farms,” said Matt Tremblay, ABS Senior Vice President, Global Offshore.
The updated ABS Guide for Building and Classing Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWT Guide) and the ABS Guide for Building and Classing Bottom-Founded Offshore Wind Turbines (BOWT Guide) both include additional notations.
The BOWT Guide includes new notations addressing the design fatigue life of the installation. Additionally, new load cases aligned with the IEC standards are added for a robustness check of the support structure for tropical cyclone prone areas.
The updated FOWT Guide includes new notations addressing design fatigue life, strength criteria for site-specific conditions and life extension. In addition, new detailed requirements for concrete hull structure, design load cases and survey are added.
Appendices are also added to provide guidance on wind spectra and coherence functions as well as tropical cyclone wind considerations.
ABS has also updated its guidance notes on Global Performance Analysis for Floating Offshore Wind Turbines, which support the FOWT Guide with performance analysis methodologies, modeling strategies and numerical simulation approaches.