Offshore Wind Turbines: Advances in Modelling, Design and Installation of Foundations

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Synopsis

Presentation 1: Seismic response of monopile foundations for offshore wind turbines in liquefiable deposits (J.K. Möller)

Due to an increasing global demand for renewable energy, the offshore wind industry is rapidly expanding in areas with high seismicity. This poses new challenges for the design of wind turbine support structures. Since simplified design methods are mostly based on the experience gained from existing wind farm projects located in Europe, they do not take dynamic earthquake excitation and seismic hazards such as seabed liquefaction into account. This talk aims to highlight some of the difficulties related to the seismic design of monopile foundations for offshore wind turbines. Through advanced dynamic Finite Element analyses, it is shown how extensive seabed liquefaction and soil-structure interaction phenomena affect the response of the system under earthquake loading.

Presentation 2: (Mono)pile response to lateral cyclic loading: analysis and modelling of field test data (E. Kementzetzidis)

Many To support the witnessed expansion, and the expected future growth of offshore wind, significant research efforts have been devoted to modelling and analysis of offshore wind turbines (OWTs). To date, OWTs are predominantly supported by monopiles – tubular steel piles up to 14 m in diameter embedded in the ground to a maximum depth of 40 m.  Currently, the foundation concept is associated with installation and design challenges due to driveability and environmental concerns for the former (installation) and knowledge gaps for the long term soil-structure interaction effects for the latter (design). In this presentation, TU Delft research efforts will be presented, which include testing of a novel installation method, conceived to address installation-related issues, followed by attempts to infer relevant installation effects on the lateral cyclic (mono)pile response based on field data and modelling efforts.

About the speakers

Stavroula Kontoe

Stavroula Kontoe is Associate Professor at the University of Patras and Visiting Reader at Imperial College London. Her publication record includes more than 100 papers in topics related to geotechnical earthquake engineering, computational geomechanics and offshore geotechnics. Her work has attracted multiple awards, namely the BGA medal 2008, the 2012 Computers & Geotechnics outstanding reviewer award, the 2017 Shamsher Prakash Foundation Excellence in Geotechnical Teaching prize and twice the David Hislop award (2019 & 2021). She has also been active as specialist consultant and as member of several International and National Committees (TC203 of ISSMGE, EEAE, IAEE), while served as Chair of SECED for the period 2020-2022. She is Editor of Computers and Geotechnics and serves at editorial boards of other journals (SDEE, JEE).  

Julia Katharina Möller

Julia Möller is a postdoctoral researcher in the Geotechnics Section at Imperial College London, currently working on the development of constitutive models for sands under cyclic loading. She holds an MSc in Civil Engineering from ETH Zurich and a PhD from Imperial College London. During her PhD research, she investigated the response of monopile foundations for offshore wind turbines under seismic loading. Her technical interests lie in the fields of dynamic Finite Element analysis and soil liquefaction phenomena.

Evangelos Kementzetzidis

Evangelos Kementzetzidis has been a lecturer at Delft University of Technology since March 2022. He has recently completed his Ph.D. thesis on the soil-structure interaction of large-diameter monopiles in sand. To date, he has published four journal papers on this topic, and additional publications are under review. He was recently awarded ICE's David Hislop Award, for the paper “Frequency effects in the dynamic lateral stiffness of monopiles in sand: insight from field tests and 3D FE modelling”.

Registration

The event is open to all and is free to attend. Please join the meeting via Teams^* by clicking on this link. No registration is required.

Further information

This online meeting is organised by Young SECED. For further information, please contact Marco Baiguera (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).

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