With the recent shift of offshore renewable energy sector towards deeper waters, the use of floating structures anchored to the seabed through mooring lines is becoming an appealing solution. Several researchers have carried out experimental and numerical analyses to assess the behaviour of plate anchors. However, being able to quickly predict the overall anchor behaviour during keying and operational loads is important for design purposes and to assess their field performance; for this purpose, macro-element modelling is a powerful and timeefficient tool which requires minimal computational effort. In that context, this paper expands a non-associative model for plate anchors to account for the effects of cyclic loading. Whereas the effects of pore-pressure generation, consolidation and eventual material de-structuration were neglected and need to be accounted for in future studies, this study shows that the anchor’s capacity decrease occurs not only due to changes in soil conditions, but also to the particular evolution of anchor’s kinematics due to anchor re-orientation during cyclic loading.
Anderson Peccin da Silva, Dr. Andrea Diambra, Dr. Dimitris Karamitros and Dr. Shiaohuey Chow
Keywords: Anchors, Macro-Element Modelling, Cyclic Loading, Offshore Floating Structures, Clay
Publisher: DFI