Van Oord cutting foundation design time with Ansys software

Van Oord is using Ansys software to speed up the design of wind turbine foundations for the offshore wind industry.

Van Oord’s engineers are using Ansys Cloud and Ansys Mechanical to optimize new product design, minimize project risk, streamline supplier negotiations and slash product development timelines.

The aim is to help engineers in their development of wind turbine foundations, as well as aid with the increase of product quality and delivery of new innovations to market faster.

According to Ansys, leveraging Mechanical and Ansys Cloud empowers Van Oord to rapidly run 5x more design iterations on Cloud to predict the performance of advanced 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 7x improvement in time savings, while greatly decreasing risk of production delay.

“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,” said 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 expedite our negotiations with foundation steel suppliers and expedited delivery to our global customers.”