The treatment of the incremental plasticity equations as a second-order cone programming (SOCP) problem have led to the development of novel Finite Element (FE) methods. In the recent years these SOCP-FE codes have reached maturity and have become commercially available, providing robust numerical predictions in line with classic FE codes. Simultaneously, the PISA joint industry research project, involving large scale field tests on short laterally loaded piles, have proven the advantage of the use of FE methods in routine design. The outcomes of PISA have been accounted for and included in new design guidelines, where nowadays 3D FE validation has become a requirement for certification. As a result, computational efficiency is expected to play a major role in the future of the offshore wind industry. This paper presents a numerical benchmark exercise using a SOCP-FE based commercial software and the publicly available data from the PISA research project. Several boundary value problems resembling pile geometries and soils from PISA are benchmarked and compared with the field test data. An extensive numerical study is performed to evaluate the numerical performance of SOCPFE methods for short laterally loaded piles applied to offshore wind.
D. Abadias, K. Krabbenhoft and J. Krabbenhoft
Keywords: Monopiles, Second-order programming, Optimization
Publisher: DFI