Wave Diffraction Forces on Offshore Wind Turbine Piles With an Octagonal Cross Section

Abstract

Traditional offshore wind turbines are normally supported by circular monopiles which are fabricated by rolling thick plates and welding them longitudinally. Due to the significant capital cost associated with the fabrication of such large circular cylinders, a new recommended innovative design to overcome such problem is introduced by replacing the circular cylinder with a vertical pile of octagonal cross-sectional shape. An efficient and very accurate semi-analytical/numerical solution based on the Scaled Boundary Finite Element Method (SBFEM) is developed to calculate the wave diffraction forces acting on the octagonal cylinders where no fundamental solutions known exist. Compared to the traditional Boundary Element Method (BEM), the SBFEM is free from the irregular frequency difficulty which means that it does not suffer from computational stability problems at sharp corners. The SBFEM solution also exhibits an enormous reduction of elements used to calculate the wave diffraction compared to the Finite Element Method (FEM), hence, a significant reduction in computational time. The SBFEM computation of the diffraction force demonstrates highly accurate results with a small number of surface elements. The presented method shows significant advantages, and is suitable for engineering applications especially the wave-structure interaction in the practical design.