Sea-Keeping Analysis of an Offshore Wind Farm Installation Vessel During the Jack-Up Process

Offshore wind farms are not planned in sheltered and shallow waters any longer. Especially in the North Sea there exist many approved offshore wind farm projects at water depth between 30 and 50 meters. In particular the installation process of these projects is strongly influenced by weather conditions and the sea-keeping capabilities of the installation vessels. For reliable planning of the entire project, not only the weather statistics, but also the vessel’s sea-keeping capabilities need to be known accurately. For this purpose different kinds of sea-keeping analyses can be conducted. In this paper a sea-keeping analysis is presented, where the focus is upon the jack-up process. For the numerical computation the sea-keeping code E4ROLLS is applied. The results of this sea-keeping analysis are operational limitations for the jack-up process, caused by two different criteria derived from jack-up classification requirements.