General Report for TC209: Offshore Geotechnics

The present report overviews the 22 contributions submitted to the session on offshore geotechnics held by Technical Committee (TC) 209 at the 19th International Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ICSMGE). Following a general discussion on the nature (fundamental or applied) of the papers included in this session, some...

Role of advanced soil modelling in the dynamic analysis of offshore wind turbines

The increasing relevance of offshore wind in the energy mix motivates continual research efforts for the optimisation of foundation systems. Currently, monopiles are still the most common foundations for offshore wind turbines (OWTs), due to their simplicity and the low costs for production/assembly. However, the modern trends towards larger...

Transient response of offshore wind turbines on monopiles in sand: Role of cyclic hydro-mechanical soil behaviour

Offshore wind turbines (OWTs) in relatively shallow waters are most often founded on monopile foundations, whose design is extremely relevant to the OWT dynamic performance under environmental loading. In this study, 3D finite element (FE) modelling is applied to the dynamic analysis of OWTs and proposed as a valuable support to current design...

Discretization effects in the finite element simulation of seismic waves in elastic and elastic-plastic media

Presented here is a numerical investigation that (re-)appraises standard rules for space/time discretization in seismic wave propagation analyses. Although the issue is almost off the table of research, situations are often encountered where (established) discretization criteria are not observed and inaccurate results possibly obtained. In...

International Benchmark on Numerical Simulations for 1D, Nonlinear Site Response (PRENOLIN): Verification Phase Based on Canonical Cases

PREdiction of NOn‐LINear soil behavior (PRENOLIN) is an international benchmark aiming to test multiple numerical simulation codes that are capable of predicting nonlinear seismic site response with various constitutive models. One of the objectives of this project is the assessment of the uncertainties associated with nonlinear simulation of 1D...

A macroelement framework for shallow foundations including changes in configuration

Macroelement plasticity models are being increasingly applied to study non-linear soil–foundation interaction (SFI) problems. Macroelement models are particularly appealing from a computational standpoint, as they can capture the essence of SFI by means of a few degrees of freedom. However, all the macroelement formulations available in the...

A stability criterion for elasto-viscoplastic constitutive relationships

Frequency domain analysis of dynamic response of drag dominated offshore structures