The Achilles heel of floating offshore wind.
Remaining useful life estimation for mooring systems, from platform motion and metocean data. A probabilistic digital twin, with no proprietary sensor installation required on the mooring itself. Developed with Eindhoven University of Technology.
Critical, costly, and largely unmonitored
Hundreds of tonnes of steel chain and synthetic rope have to survive twenty-five years of combined wave fatigue and corrosion in water depths of sixty to two hundred metres, in an environment where direct inspection is extremely difficult and vessel mobilisation runs into the millions.
The industry answers this with conservative, deterministic safety margins. That means over-engineered mooring systems, fixed inspection intervals regardless of actual condition, and expensive unplanned mobilisation when a line does fail. There is no standard way to know, in real time, how much life a mooring line has left. As floating wind moves to commercial scale, that gap stops being tolerable.
The MOOR-LIFE framework
A probabilistic digital twin and an AI-based remaining useful life estimation framework, advancing the state of the art in three areas.
Probabilistic degradation modelling
Bayesian inference on fatigue damage and corrosion, driven by platform motion and metocean data. Nothing proprietary has to be installed on the mooring system itself, which is what makes it deployable on assets already in the water.
Remaining useful life with stated uncertainty
Models trained on public benchmark datasets, delivering remaining life predictions with quantified uncertainty bands rather than a single number. An honest range is more useful than false precision.
Circularity and lifetime extension
A view that quantifies steel saved, carbon avoided and the operating cost impact of moving from schedule-based to condition-based maintenance decisions.
MOOR-LIFE at a glance
- Funding
- TKI Offshore Energy, a public-private partnership programme.
- Duration
- October 2025 to February 2027.
- Readiness
- Progressing from TRL 3 to TRL 5 across the project.
- Research partner
- Eindhoven University of Technology.
- Network
- NedZero and OWIC, with industry support from TouchWind.
- Key deliverables
- A modular open-core digital twin at TRL 5, a validated probabilistic remaining life algorithm with a real-time update cycle, a state agent that expresses mooring health in plain language for operators, and lifetime extension guidelines aligned with the relevant certification framework.
Who we are looking to talk to
This is funded research heading towards a product, and it improves fastest in contact with the people who will have to rely on it.
Developers and project teams
Working on mooring analysis today and interested in early access to condition-based tools.
Mooring engineers and naval architects
Willing to collaborate on validating the framework against cases they know well.
Classification bodies
Interested in how this aligns with emerging condition-based maintenance standards.
Operators
Who would consider piloting condition-based mooring maintenance on part of a fleet.
The tool is designed to complement your existing workflow rather than replace it, and we would rather hear about your specific case than present ours.
Working on floating wind moorings today?
Whether you are at design stage, in construction or already operating, we want to hear about the specific problem in front of you. Early conversations shape what this becomes, and the framework is meant to sit alongside your existing analysis rather than replace it.
