Offshore planners and operators can now take advantage of a new tool that supports the safe and efficient execution of operations on offshore energy assets. DHI launched Metocean Risk Ops, a workability assessment application that offers access to weather window and downtime analyses to support the operation and maintenance of offshore wind farms, installations and long-haul transportations.
Metocean Risk Ops will soon be expanded to support decommissioning of offshore wind farms.
DHI developer Pietro Danilo Tomaselli said that decision-making for offshore operations relies on the accurate assessment of conditions at sea, traditionally using bulk metocean parameters. However, this approach can often lead to unreliable workability assessments as it doesn’t directly account for actual decision drivers. This means operational cost inefficiencies for the offshore industry and physical hazards for the offshore operators.
“Using Metocean Risk Ops, one can create more efficient and reliable workability assessments,” Tomaselli said. “As a cloud-based application that integrates world-class metocean data with practical risk measures derived from vessel motions, Metocean Risk Ops is the ideal tool for weather window predictions in operational scenarios and seasonal downtime analyses at design stage. Plus, anyone can simulate the entire operation — vessel navigation included — as no modeling expertise is needed.”
Metocean Risk Ops extracts and imports metocean hindcast/forecast data. Output includes visual results for work planning and sharing with others.
The app can update workability assessments as weather forecasts change — eliminating guesswork. Another feature is its ability to monitor workability conditions along a user-defined vessel route using its computational engine.
Metocean Risk Ops can also devise long-term seasonal plans based on metocean hindcast. Users can create accurate downtime analyses backed by MetOcean Data Portal offering 40 years of validated wind, wave, water level and current data.
Metocean Risk Ops was recently tested during the towing of the TetraSpar floating wind turbine foundation from Grenå, Denmark to the Marine Energy Test Centre off the coast of Stavanger, Norway. The towing was a part of the TetraSpar Demonstration Project involving Stiesdal Offshore Technologies, Shell, RWE and TEPCO Renewable Power.
“We were very happy to see that MRO successfully predicted the weather windows during which all planned tasks were safely executed,” Tomaselli said.
News item from DHI
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