Offshore wind is central to decarbonising the world economy. Ambitious plans exist in the UK and across Europe, USA, China, Taiwan and elsewhere, to expand the number of offshore wind turbines installed and operating. Driving down costs is critical if offshore wind is to be a sustainable long-term energy business. Civil and geotechnical engineering design plays an important role in this development as the wind turbine foundation contributes significantly to the installed capital cost. The PISA (Pile-Soil Analysis) project produced new design methods for monotonic loading of monopiles that significantly reduce the dimensions and costs for next generation wind turbine monopile foundations. Building on this success a new project, PICASO (Pile Cyclic Analysis: Oxford and Ørsted), has been developed to extend and embed these new ideas into routine engineering design. New developments focus specifically on cyclic loading, as the action of wind, waves and turbine operation impose significant repetitive loads on the structure and foundation. Currently there are limited means for properly accounting for this loading within the soil-structure response or integrating it into a computational model of the turbine to assess long term performance. This paper provides an overview of the PICASO project, which will deliver new design methods and models to address cyclic pile design for monopiles. Success will allow wind turbines to be designed more robustly and cheaply. There are five strands of work including: (a) advanced foundation modelling; (b) calibration methods (laboratory element and model test scale); (c) theoretical developments; (d) medium scale field testing; (e) application to design.
Byron W. Byrne, Amin Aghakouchak, Róisín M. Buckley, Harvey J. Burd, Jens Gengenbach, Guy T. Houlsby, Ross A. McAdam, Christopher M. Martin, Fabian Schranz, Brian B. Sheil and Stephen K. Suryasentana
Keywords: Cyclic Loading, Monopiles, Offshore Wind
Publisher: DFI