Van Oord and Ansys Boost Design of Sustainable Wind Turbines

Van Oord is working with Ansys to speed environmental sustainability while expediting new product designs for the offshore wind turbine industry. Ansys is aiding Van Oord engineers in their development of wind turbine foundations.

Designing wind turbine foundations typically requires Van Oord engineers to invest considerable time developing numerous complex, dynamic analysis finite element models. To accelerate and optimize the simulation process, Van Oord's engineering team worked with Ansys channel partner Infinite Simulation Systems B.V. to harness Ansys Mechanical and Ansys Cloud, which spurred design optimization, shortened product development timelines and boosted the efficiency of next-gen offshore wind turbines, according to the companies. 

Leveraging Mechanical and Ansys Cloud empowers Van Oord engineers to rapidly run more design iterations on Cloud to predict the performance of advanced wind turbine foundations and enhance the fabrication processes while reducing project risks and speeding supply chain negotiations. As a result, simulations that required a week to run on multiple costly workstations now run overnight, delivering a seven-times improvement in time savings, while decreasing risk of production delay, according to the companies.

"Van Oord engineers employ Ansys Cloud to spur new product innovation and solve the ever-growing number of Mechanical models, which may feature over 5.5 million degrees of freedom, 1.8 million nodes and 550,000 elements," says Ralph Luiken, engineering specialist at Van Oord. "Historically, these massive models each required 150 hours to run, however, with Ansys Cloud, our team has reduced run times to less than 24 hours per simulation. This has substantially sped up product development, enabled us to expediate our negotiations with foundation steel suppliers and expedited delivery to our global customers." 

"Ansys is proud to join forces with Van Oord engineers to fast-track their R&D efforts and help achieve their sustainability goals by creating highly efficient offshore wind turbine foundations that deliver renewable energy to millions of households worldwide," says Shane Emswiler, senior vice president at Ansys. "Ansys Cloud is built specifically for our flagship solvers, powering push-button access to Microsoft Azure Cloud computing resources. This significantly speeds up the wind turbine foundation design and analysis process for Van Oord engineers, equipping them to improve the production efficiency of new products and elevate offshore wind energy to greater heights."

On April 20-21, Van Oord will present "Hands-on Experience with Ansys Cloud Computing: Accelerating Complex Engineering Simulations within the Offshore Wind Industry" at Simulation World 2021. The presentation will be available live and on demand. 

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.