Influence of Design Parameters on Operability of Offshore Construction Vessels

The ongoing exploration of the marine environment and the increasing effort to use the sea as a source of energy leads to an increasing demand for more weather independent services within marine operations. While the currently applied limiting conditions for marine operations are rather generally expressed in terms of a maximum feasible significant wave height, marine operators indicate an increasing need for more vessel and task specific limitation criteria. The presented work provides knowledge on selected marine operations to establish performance criteria with the goal to find vessel and task specific weather limitations and to show possibilities to push operational ranges beyond today's boundaries. The investigation of the question why certain offshore vessels perform better in harsh weather conditions than others involves the analysis of numerous parameters contributing to the complete operational process such as vessel behavior in waves, technical aspects of cranes and equipment, deck layout, as well as organizational, and communication issues. Based on a broad database of offshore vessel response behavior, this publication shows first results of the research activities within the research project Vessel Performance as a part of SFI MOVE (Norwegian center for research-driven innovation – Marine Operations). A method is proposed to establish performance indicators for the evaluation of vessel response performance with the aim of using vessel and task specific weather limitation criteria.