Analysis of Spar with Floating Dock

The installation of wind turbines at offshores is a complex and arduous task. The floating dock concept is the current method for installing an offshore wind turbine which is discussed in details in this paper. This paper investigates a floating dock that provides shielding to the spar foundation while installing a 5 MW wind turbine at the offshore site. The floating dock of 60 m inner diameter and 85 m length is analyzed using ANSYS AQWA software for calculating the Heave Response Amplitude Operator (RAO). Viscous damping is provided as an external damping matrix in the hydrodynamic diffraction analysis of ANSYS AQWA. It is noticed that viscous damping plays a major role in the analysis. The behavior of Spar with and without dock is analyzed. It can be observed that the floating dock helps in reducing the heave RAO of the Spar.