Orcina news

OrcaFlex 9.3 released

As now seems to be traditional, here at Orcina we have spent the summer months working very hard to complete a major upgrade to OrcaFlex. The result is OrcaFlex 9.3 which was formally released early in August. We have just despatched the final upgrade CD and so all customers with up-to-date MUS contracts will have […]

OrcaFlex post-processing spreadsheet

We have recently become aware that the version of the OrcaFlex spreadsheet released with OrcaFlex 9.2 has some performance problems. These do not always manifest themselves and we have not seen the problems ourselves. Fortunately a small number of clients have raised the issue and we have been able, with help from those clients, to […]

Non-linear Seabed Soil Model Released

We have now released the non-linear seabed soil model in OrcaFlex 9.2e. The model has been developed by Professor Mark Randolph (Centre for Offshore Foundation Systems, University of Western Australia), a recognised expert in this field, and we have been working with Mark to implement the model in OrcaFlex. The model is for modelling the […]

OrcaFlex 9.2 released

We are very pleased to announce the release of OrcaFlex version 9.2a. We are now starting the process of producing the installation CDs and customers with up to date MUS contracts should receive the upgrade in the middle of September. There are a great many enhancements to the software which we described in the previous […]

OrcaFlex 9.2 new features

It’s been a long time since our last article and we’ve all been very consumed with work for OrcaFlex 9.2. We are nearly ready to release this major upgrade and are now in a position to announce the new features which it will introduce. The major enhancements fall into the following categories: Performance Bend Stiffener […]

OrcaFlex 9.1 released, the fastest OrcaFlex yet!

As I’m quite sure every OrcaFlex user knows by now, OrcaFlex 9.0 introduced an implicit time domain solver in addition to the existing explicit solver. This change led to huge improvements in run times and thus prompted us to award the release ‘major upgrade status’ and promote it from version 8 to version 9! In […]

Keyboard shortcuts for rotation

One of the changes we made in OrcaFlex 9.1 was a re-mapping of keyboard shortcuts. Mostly this was motivated by a desire to map CTRL+S to File | Save and CTRL+O to File | Open. To make room for these changes we had to rearrange a number of other shortcuts. In particular the shortcuts to […]

Possible changes to modelling of hollow spar buoys

This article proposes some possible changes that we are considering, to the way OrcaFlex treats the water inside a hollow spar buoy, i.e. where a spar buoy object in an OrcaFlex model has a non-zero ID specified for one or more of its cylinders. We would welcome feedback from OrcaFlex users (and potential users) on […]

Whole System Statics

Many of the software support questions we receive concern statics convergence. Before the release of OrcaFlex 9.0 we would regularly employ a host of methods to deal with stubborn cases. The problem cases would usually involve 6D Buoys. OrcaFlex 9.0 introduced a new statics method called Whole System Statics (WSS) which provides a great leap […]

Effective Tension Validation

Orcina have recently carried out a validation of the way OrcaFlex handles buoyancy forces and pipe internal contents pressure effects, and the resulting effective tension and wall tension that OrcaFlex reports. We have validated these OrcaFlex results against results presented in Nigel Barltrop’s well-respected book “Dynamics of Floating Structures: a guide for design and analysis. […]