Techno-economic model for designing marine and offshore power generating systems

The design of Marine and Offshore Power Generating Systems (MOPGS) at the conceptual stage of the project is not addressed adequately by present design models. These methods tend to focus on specific design issues governing the system, and only able to handle limited number of designed systems at one time to select the optimal system. Moreover, existing models do not fully address issues from an organization, and business-oriented design perspectives.; This thesis presents a new design model to provide an integrative decision-making model for designing MOPGS, and introduces a product-, organization-, and business-oriented (Techno-Economic) design perspective for designing such large-scale complex systems. This TEM uses mathematically formulated models to design five types of power generating systems incorporating industrial safety rules, initial system reliability, thermodynamic, engineering and economic concepts in their design. It also allows an unrestricted combinations of MOPGS be designed from a prior knowledge database.; The TEM's usefulness is verified and validated against two industry-designed MOPGS. The results show that the model yield accurate predictions when it is subjected to industrial-based design scenarios. This model extends present design capability of such systems by guiding designers to seek for optimal systems based on a set of systematic design sequences derived from the characteristics of the analytical models and knowledge database. It is also able to demonstrate that power generating system has a better operating performance when designed under the techno-economic perspective instead of being designed based on a solely engineering perspective.; The TEM's effectiveness is further demonstrated by using it to design MOPGS catering to two types of oil field development projects, a 20 year life cycle system operating in five marginal fields, and a 16½ year life cycle system operating in one large field. Each oil field projects design scenario allows different combinations of simulated oil price and oil production uncertainties. An integrative decision-making product and business model is introduced here for the first time to be used for selecting MOPGS at the conceptual stage of the design project to cater to these uncertainties.