Ship collision analysis on Offshore Wind Turbines with monopile foundations

Every year the offshore wind industry is expanding and new offshore wind farms are built in deeper waters and closer to the traffic lanes for commercial and passenger ships leading to possible collision events. The consequences of such events can range from minor structural damage to collapse of the Offshore Wind Turbine (OWT), with probability of ship sinking, pollution and at worst, to loss of human lives. Therefore, a collision risk analysis becomes a necessity in the pre-design stage of an offshore wind farm in order to identify the collision scenarios having the greatest probabilities of occurrence but also the most dangerous ones.
The objective of this research is to investigate numerically the influence of the impact velocity and wind loads on the OWT’s behaviour when subjected to ship impact. A 5 MW wind turbine was considered for this research and the striking ship was conservatively assumed to be rigid. The description of the Finite Element model is presented as well as the main results obtained.