Offshore Design Project

The primary objective of this course is to enable students to produce a conceptual engineering design for offshore structures. During this course, students gain a thorough theoretical understanding of the design process, its structuring, available design methodologies and the philosophy behind the design codes.

Throughout the course students work on a group design project, where each student team designs an offshore jacket support structure for wind energy applications from scratch up to a preliminary design by performing a full design-cycle. This design-cycle includes:

1. The design and assembly of the structure geometry and the structural configuration, including a natural frequency analysis,

2. Determining and assessing the permanent and environmental loads, including both hydrodynamics and wind, on the structure,

3. The design, analysis and evaluation of its foundation,

4. The analysis of the jacket structure by using structural mechanics approaches, and

5. The evaluation of the jacket structure against ULS and, if applicable, FLS design criteria.

Through this group design project, students will not only learn to judge their design against ULS and FLS design criteria, but they will also develop an instinct on how to best modify and improve their design based on both static and dynamic structural analyses. Thereby, students will learn how to analyse and evaluate the dimensioning and performance of structural components for strength and stability. Furthermore, students learn to predict how changing (parts of) their design will influence the corresponding loads and based on their insight in these loads, be able to defend their design choices. Moreover, students will learn what the practical implications of their design choices are for operations and other feasibility and life-cycle aspects. To reinforce the understanding of these aspects, the course program also includes a visit to an offshore structures fabrication yard.

During this course, students will additionally learn how to collaborate effectively in a team and develop skills and competences to motivate their assumptions and provide argumentation of their design choices by accounting for relevant moral values, norms and principles.