Colloquia

Summary

KENC Engineering B.V. is an engineering firm that operates in the offshore wind industry and has strategic plans to expand in line with the anticipated growth of the offshore wind sector. KENC is currently investing substantial time and effort in creating design proposals during tender processes of Monopile Upending and Lifting Tools (MPULT). Consequently, KENC wants to streamline its conceptual MPULT design process and reduce the time it invests in these proposals.

In the design process, there is a conflict between the intent to reduce the amount of time KENC invests, while still wanting to deliver high-quality proposals to convince the customer to choose their product over the product of competitors. To produce a high-quality proposal, the design must be competitively priced while being of sufficient structural strength. In KENC's current conceptual design process, the optimization between these objectives is done iteratively based on the experience of the engineer. This approach has room for improvement.

Literature research is performed to identify a practice which can deal with the conflicting objectives and improve the conceptual design process. The practice that was found to be most suitable to KENC's application is tradespace exploration, where alternatives are created and evaluated systematically to find optimal solutions by balancing multiple objectives. A method is developed for implementing tradespace exploration to create conceptual structural MPULT designs. This is done by establishing models to approximate the structural strength of simplified MPULTs using static hand calculations rather than Finite Element Analysis (FEA). The established models are incorporated into an Excel tradespace exploration tool.

By applying the tool in a case study, the working principles and outcomes of the tool are validated. Discussions are held with KENC to verify the utility of the Excel tool and to gain insights into how the implementation of tradespace exploration improved the conceptual MPULT design process. The resulting conclusion highlights that tradespace exploration can be used to identify cost-effective conceptual MPULT designs while reducing the time it takes to create them.