IROE PhD student Oscar Festa presents at ISOPE 2022

Last week I had the pleasure to present my latest paper “Proxy model for the design of extensible mooring systems for floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs)” at the 32nd International Ocean and Polar Engineering conference (ISOPE 2022). The conference took place in a hybrid format in Shanghai, China, and due to the current COVID restrictions I was unable to travel there. I recorded my presentation and uploaded it to the ISOPE website, where it was made available for all other conference attendees.

The paper, co-authored with my supervisors, Prof Susan Gourvenec and Assoc Prof Adam Sobey, offers a numerical-based model for designing extensible sections of mooring line (springs) for floating wind turbines, which aim to reduce peak loads on moorings and anchors. The model employs polynomial and interpolated curve fitting, and can estimate the most effective extensible section design for reducing loads for a range of extreme load cases and platform offset constrains.

For what has been typically a very oil & gas - oriented conference, it was great to see a lot of research on support structures and stationkeeping systems for FOWTs. I got the chance to learn about some novel hybrid mooring arrangements for FOWTs in shallow water, as well some interesting new platform design concepts. Always good to see passionate offshore engineers from around the world sharing ideas!

The author-prepared manuscript of our paper can be accessed via university of Southampton e-prints here.