Van Oord and Ansys Accelerate the Design of Highly Sustainable Offshore Wind Turbines 

Ansys helps reduce model run time from 150 hours to 24 hours, speeding development time by 7x 

Key Highlights

• Ansys solutions enable Van Oord to quickly increase design load combinations and improve calculation time for advanced wind turbine foundation development 
• Van Oord’s engineers use Ansys Cloud and Ansys Mechanical to optimize new product design, minimize project risk, streamline supplier negotiations and slash product development timelines

PITTSBURGH, PA, April 16, 2021 – Van Oord is working with Ansys (NASDAQ: ANSS) to speed environmental sustainability while expediting new product designs for the offshore wind turbine industry. Ansys is aiding Van Oord engineers in their development of cutting-edge wind turbine foundations, helping them increase product quality and deliver new innovations to market faster than ever before.

Designing wind turbine foundations typically requires Van Oord engineers to invest considerable time developing numerous complex, dynamic analysis finite element models. To accelerate and optimize the simulation process, Van Oord’s engineering team worked with Ansys channel partner Infinite Simulation Systems B.V. to harness Ansys^® Mechanical^™ and Ansys^® Cloud^™ , which spurred design optimization, significantly shortened product development timelines and boosted the efficiency of next-gen offshore wind turbines.

Leveraging Mechanical and Ansys Cloud empowers Van Oord engineers to rapidly run 5x more design iterations on Cloud to predict the performance of advanced wind turbine 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 Offshore Wind Monopile Foundation. Photo courtesy of Van Oord.

“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 expediate our negotiations with foundation steel suppliers and expedited delivery to our global customers.”

“Ansys is proud to join forces with Van Oord engineers to fast-track their R&D efforts and help achieve their sustainability goals by creating highly efficient offshore wind turbine foundations that deliver renewable energy to millions of households worldwide,” said Shane Emswiler, senior vice president at Ansys. “Ansys Cloud is built specifically for our flagship solvers, powering push-button access to Microsoft Azure Cloud computing resources. This significantly speeds up the wind turbine foundation design and analysis process for Van Oord engineers, equipping them to improve the production efficiency of new products and elevate offshore wind energy to greater heights.”

On April 20^th and 21^st, Van Oord will present “Hands-on Experience with Ansys Cloud Computing: Accelerating Complex Engineering Simulations within the Offshore Wind Industry” at Simulation World 2021. The presentation will be available live and on demand. To register for Simworld, please visit: https://www.simulationworld.com/. 

About Ansys

If you've ever seen a rocket launch, flown on an airplane, driven a car, used a computer, touched a mobile device, crossed a bridge or put on wearable technology, chances are you've used a product where Ansys software played a critical role in its creation. Ansys is the global leader in engineering simulation. Through our strategy of Pervasive Engineering Simulation, we help the world's most innovative companies deliver radically better products to their customers. By offering the best and broadest portfolio of engineering simulation software, we help them solve the most complex design challenges and create products limited only by imagination. Founded in 1970, Ansys is headquartered south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Visit www.ansys.com for more information.

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