Orcina news

We have now finished our series of OrcaFlex 11.3 user group meetings! These were once again held online, and while this meant we missed being able to see you all in-person, it did provide an opportunity for many people to participate who may otherwise have not been able to get to an in-person event. During the four meetings we had over 400 attendees from 25 countries around the world, from as far afield as Australia, Hungary, Japan, Qatar and Sweden.

If you weren’t able to attend, the recordings are now available to view online, either via our YouTube channel or the videos page of our website. Please do forward links to any of your colleagues who you feel may be interested.

We hope that you found the sessions helpful and informative. Thanks again for your continued support and we wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year!

We have now finished our series of OrcaFlex 11.2 user group meetings! These were once again held online, which provided an opportunity for many people to participate who may otherwise have not been able to get to an in-person event. Of the nearly 500 people who attended over the four meetings, we had 26 countries represented, including some less frequently visited places such as Greece, Hungary and Ukraine!

We were very encouraged by the level of attendance and hope that you found the sessions helpful and informative.

If you weren’t able to attend, the recordings are now available to view online, either via our YouTube channel or the videos page of our website. Please do forward links to any of your colleagues who you feel may be interested.

Thanks again for your continued support!

We had a fantastic series of OrcaFlex 11.1 user group meetings last week! Thank you to everyone who attended, we hope you found them interesting and informative.

Whilst we would love to have been able to see you in person, there were also tangible benefits from conducting the user group meetings in this way. For example, of the 386 individuals who attended one or more sessions, we had nearly 30 countries represented. Some of those present were from parts of the world we would not normally visit on a regular basis, such as Israel, Japan, Canada and Vietnam!

In all, we had over 800 attendees across all six sessions! It was incredibly encouraging to see such large numbers, as well as some really interactive Q&A sessions which, for us, were one of the highlights.

You can find recordings of all sessions on the videos page of our website, as well as on our YouTube page.

Following the introduction of the turbine model object in version 10.3 we have now produced a report which details the validation performed on the turbine against documented industry studies.

The validation study considers the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) offshore 5-MW baseline wind turbine, which is
recognised as an industry-standard reference turbine system.

Two separate turbine systems have been modelled and subjected to detailed analysis in OrcaFlex:

• A land-based wind turbine system.
• A floating wind turbine system – based on the OC3 Hywind system.

Analysis of the land-based scenario was considered to facilitate basic validation of the turbine response determined via OrcaFlex. Detailed analysis of the OC3 Hywind system was then considered to help validate the behaviour of a fully-coupled floating wind turbine system in OrcaFlex.

Results were compared to those from other wind turbine simulation tools; namely FAST, MSC.ADAMS, Bladed and HAWC2.

Overall, OrcaFlex has been shown to accurately capture the aerodynamic and hydrodynamic loading on the considered turbine systems. Close agreement was generally observed between the OrcaFlex results and those available from the other simulation tools – particularly with respect to the calculated turbine rotor response.

The full report is available alongside previously published OrcaFlex validation cases on the validation page here.

We have just released a minor upgrade, version 10.3c, which fixes a number of bugs. Full details of the changes are described here. We recommend that users of 10.3 upgrade to 10.3c.

A patch to upgrade from 10.3a or 10.3b to 10.3c can be downloaded here. The full installation program can also be downloaded from your download page. Please contact us if you do not have the link to your download page.