Nowadays, Spain is a benchmark in the value chain of offshore wind power installations, so confirmed by Spanish Naval Architecture Congress, held in Bilbao, where Siport21 has presented two of its projects related to this industry.
Offshore wind turbine fields require the manufacture of large-scale elements (cylindrical structures of the tower, the nacelle, or the blades themselves, among others). Many of these elements are transported by sea from the ports and terminals which adapt their facilities for this purpose. Therefore, these ports must be able to allow the safe operation of vessels specialized in this transport, such as Heavy Lift vessels.
In many cases, the parts being transported protrude beyond the vessel’s limits, which makes it necessary to accurately assess the access conditions and the required navigation spaces (channel width and depth) as well as the air space to confirm that maneuvers are carried out with a sufficient level of safety (additional margins to structures or port elements).
The use of simulation tools that include the human factor, such as the Siport21 real-time ship maneuvering simulator, is very useful for the evaluation of this type of scenarios, where visual perception is a paramount factor in these operations.
On the other hand, Siport21 has presented the importance of the nautical risk assessment in the analysis of the location of a project of this type, due to its eventual impact on maritime traffic.
To this aim, the company uses its methodology that considers all the related factors, future design scenarios -involving new infrastructure- and adds different hypotheses about the evolution of maritime traffic, both in typology and frequency of the operations.
In these cases, Siport21 combines existing technical recommendations with Big Data, Data Analytics, and DataViz, together with Artificial Intelligence algorithms, to identify space-time relationships between different traffic and the physical conditions. Advanced methods allow analyzing large data volume efficiently. In addition, their traffic prediction mathematical model, Siflow21, helps establishing the safety and service level of the offshore wind energy field area.
All this makes it possible to identify the main risk factors to optimize the design and define contingency measures to reduce risks, ensuring that they remain within acceptable limits.
For Siport21, the offshore wind industry is one of the pillars on which it supports the future of its activity, generating new services for its clients.
