This paper briefly describes a novel approach of estimating weather windows for decision support in offshore wind turbine installation projects. The proposed methodology is based on statistical analysis of extreme physical responses of the installation equipment (such as lifting cable loads, motions of lifted objects, etc.), subjected to offshore met-ocean environment and limited by maximum allowable responses of the equipment used. An important aspect of any novel methodology is evaluating how well it performs compared to the standard methods given the same input. Hence, the main focus of this paper is on benchmarking the new methodology against the standard method for weather window estimation—the Alpha-factor method proposed by (DNV, 2011). The evaluation is done in a form of synthetic case study—an offshore wind turbine rotor lift operation at the FINO3 met-mast location. Performance of both methods is measured in terms of number and length of predicted weather windows.
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