Abstract

With the newdevelopments of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWT), wind farms are located in deeperwater, meaning they are closer to traffic cargo and passenger lanes, increasing probability of collision.This paper aims to analyze the crashworthiness of a spar FOWT by performing non-linear finite element simulations, which in the future will serve to validate a simplified analytical method for performing the same analysis in a faster and reliable way. The influence of parameters like nacelle mass, hydrodynamic forces, gravity, ballast mass and mooring line tension is analyzed. First simulations are run assuming a rigid striking ship in order to understand the crashworthiness of FOWT only. Then, the ship is modelledas deformable and the effect of bow deformability is investigated. Regarding internal mechanics, the main deformation modes are identified and deformation energies, structure indentations andresistant forces are post-processed. As external mechanics is concerned, rigid-bodies motions during and after the collision are analyzed for different collision scenarios.