Hard, rocky seabed are today of some interest in the offshore foundation field and for the engineering research of new solutions. The interest arises from different and independent sources. On one side, the renewable energy industry based on the harvesting of tidal energy, which is looking more and more for harsh seabed where water currents are steady and enough to provide the sufficient power production. On another side, constant currents at seabed could be used to cool and avoid temperature rise in new kinds of submerged datacenter which are supposed to be placed offshore below water. In both cases, the presence of steady current and significant tidal actions in the sea waters provides the elements that are associated to clean from sediments, rocky seabed. The challenge is to develop a new concept of foundation like the pin foundation, whose engineering behaviour will be shortly described in this paper. The numerical model which was created will be described, starting with the properties of the selected rock seabed and then progressing the details of the numerical model itself. Obtained results, despite not completely conclusive about the global behaviour of the pin, allow to conclude about the capacity of the pin to reach a stable condition during horizontal loading with constant vertical load provided by a dead gravity load.
Emilio Nicolini, F. Dedecker and R. Coquet
Keywords: tidal, foundation, hard, seabed
Publisher: DFI