Geotechnical Bearing Capacity of Timber Piles in the City of Amsterdam: Derivation of bearing capacity prediction factors based on static load tests conducted on instrumented timber piles

In the city of Amsterdam, many structures, such as houses,bridges and quay walls, are founded on wooden piles. In order to gain insightinto the safety of such structures, assessment of the foundations is required.As part of an experimental framework assessing the safety of bridges and quaywalls in the city of Amsterdam, a...

Determination of differential settlements of high-rise building foundations in soft soil conditions: A framework for daily engineering practice

Currently, the settlements of high-rise buildings are calculated based on two methods. The single pile settlements (s1), are generated due to mobilised shaft friction and pile tip resistance. These settlements are determined with analytical methods (i.e. NEN 9997-1, 2017). Settlements related to pile group behaviour in soil layers below pile tip...

Seismic liquefaction analysis of a critical facility with PM4Sand in Plaxis

In seismically active areas, liquefaction hazards have always been a complicated aspect to evaluate as part of the seismic design of a project. In the case of the design of critical facilities, this becomes crucial, as beyond design basis conditions may elevate the seismic loads significantly and create a considerable liquefaction risk in areas...

Practical Engineering Design Tool for Vibration Sensitive Laboratory Building Structures: Development of a practical design tool based on a scientific model for an early design of vibration sensitive laboratory building structures excited by traffic induced vibrations for use in engineering practice

The prediction of structural vibrations in vibration sensitive laboratory structures is a complex problem involving computationally heavy 3D models with long computational times. However, in the early design phases of a project long computational times are undesirable. Therefore the problem statement of this Master thesis concerns the...

Feasibility of curved pipe pull operations: A research based on a numerical model and physical experiments

Due to often existing subsea infrastructure or challenging seabed conditions, engineers are forced to design newnearshore pipeline trajectories that are not always in a straight line. Since subsea tie-in operations are often complex and relatively expensive, alternative methods like pulling pipelines into a curve are worthwhile. By means of this...

Capturing 3D Continuum Effects in a 1D Soil-Structure Interaction Model for Seismic Analysis of Offshore Wind Turbines

Offshore wind energy is considered a necessary energy resource, that may stimulate the transition from fossil fuels. Following the successful development in Western Europe, offshore wind is quickly gaining momentum in the Asia-Pacific region. At variance with North-Sea based offshore wind turbines (OWTs), structures installed in the Asia-Pacific...

3D FE seismic analysis of a monopile-supported offshore wind turbine in a non-liqueable soil deposit

This work presents a numerical study on the dynamic response of monopile-supported offshore wind turbines (OWTs) under seismic loading conditions. For this purpose the realistic design ofa 8 MW OWT is considered as ideally located in a layered, non-liqueable site off the coast of Japan. This choice allowed to employ available site...

Post-Liquefaction Soil-Structure Interaction of Pipelines Buried in Sand: Using Modern Simulation Techniques

The starting point of this thesis lies in the area on Groningen, Netherlands. More specifically, induced earthquake activity is observed in this area due to gas extraction activities, which reduce underground gas pressure. In combination with the location’s geomorphology, liquefaction can occur due to earthquake excitations. Furthermore, the...

Reliability based Assessment of Quay Walls

Uncertainties in the soil parameters play a major role in the design of quay walls. In the current design approach, partial factors are prescribed to account for uncertainties in the soil, as well as for other types of uncertainties. This semi-probabilistic (level I) design approach needs to result in a reliable design for a range of quay...

A Winkler Model for the Seismic Analysis of Monopile Foundations: An Exploratory Study on the Modelling of Soil-Structure Interaction during Earthquakes

The growing interest in the development of offshore wind farms in seismic active areas demands a better insight into the requirements earthquakes impose on the design of wind turbine foundations. The complexity of the soil-structure interaction (SSI) during an earthquake results in large uncertainties in the design process of a monopile...

Three-dimensional finite element analysis of offshore jack-up structures accounting for non-linear soil-structure interaction

Jack-up structures are widely used in the offshore industry. Not only in the field of oil and gas, but also in the installation for offshore wind turbines. These jack-up structures typically consist of three trusswork legs, where the foundation is formed by inverted conical cones that are penetrated into the soil, called spudcans. The spudcans...

The capabilities of the Plaxis Shotcrete material model for designing laterally loaded reinforced concrete structures in the subsurface

A hot topic in the Netherlands is the safety reassessment of dikes. Currently several (river)dikes are being reinforced to withstand a given normative high water level. The environment of those dikes is often characterised by small floodplains and urban areas right next to the dike, wherefore standard geo-technical measures cannot be applied....

Optimization of modeling pile foundations

In this thesis different models are considered which can deal with the interaction between pile foundations and structures. This to find the most efficient way to model pile foundation structures whereby both the efficiency of the design as building process are taken into account. This are the models D-Pile (geotechnical), Scia Engineer ...

De Industriële Tunnelbouw Methode in het Ondergronds Logistiek Systeem / The Industrial Tunnelling Method in the Underground Logistic System: Een analyse van de tunnel-grond interactie in axiale richting / Analysis of axial soil – structure interaction

Het OLS-project (Ondergronds Logistiek Systeem) beoogd een betrouwbare verbinding te creëren voor het transport van bloemen tussen de veiling in Aalsmeer, Schiphol en een toekomstige railterminal bij Hoofddorp. Een variant voor de uitvoering van de drie boortunnels in het tracé is de Industriële Tunnelbouw Methode (ITM). Dit is een innovatieve...