Abstract
Suction caissons are widely used foundations in offshore engineering. The change in excess pore pressure and seepage field caused by penetration and suction significantly affects the soil resistance around the caisson wall and tip, and also affects the deformation of the soil within and adjacent to the caisson. This study uses Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) large deformation solid-fluid coupled FEM to investigate the changes in suction pressure and the seepage field during the process of the suction caisson installation in sand. A nonlinear Drucker-Prager model is used to model soil, while Coulomb friction is applied at the soil-caisson interface. The ALE solid-fluid coupled FEM is shown to be able to successfully simulate both jacked penetration and suction penetration caisson installation processes in sand observed in centrifuge tests. The difference in penetration resistance for jacked and suction installation is found to be caused by the seepage and excess pore pressure generated during the suction caisson installation, highlighting the importance of using solid-fluid coupled effective stress-based analysis to consider seepage in the evaluation of suction caisson penetration.
Highlights
With rapid offshore wind turbine development, suction caissons are becoming widely used
An Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) large deformation solid-fluid coupled FEM method was developed in this study to thedeformation changes in suction pressurecoupled and the seepage field during
Upon validation of the solid-fluid study to investigate the changes in suction pressure and the seepage field during coupling formulation and implementation using a dynamic consolidation example, the cess of the suction caisson installation in sand
Summary
With rapid offshore wind turbine development, suction caissons are becoming widely used. Wang et al [19] used the Abaqus ALE method to analyze the influence of soil-caisson friction angle and caisson geometry on penetration resistance and soil plug These methods often treat soil as a single-phase material using total stress analysis and does not consider the effect of seepage within the soil. This paper combines large deformation and solid-fluid coupling methods to fully consider the entire suction caisson penetration process and analyze the mechanism of suction caisson penetration through numerical means. This study develops a large deformation two-phase analysis approach using the ALE method with u-p solid-fluid coupled formulation to investigate the penetration resistance evolution associated with seepage and penetration during suction caisson installation in sand.
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