COMPLAS 2023

Verification and Practical Use of the High Cycle Accumulation Model for Sand

  • Tantivangphaisal, Pishun (Imperial College London)
  • Taborda, David (Imperial College London)
  • Kontoe, Stavroula (University of Patras)

Please login to view abstract download link

As offshore wind turbines continue to form a significant part of the renewable energy transition, there is an urgent need to assess the lifetime performance of foundations supporting these turbines under long-term cyclic wind and wave loading. The prediction of their long-term mechanical response is highly dependent on the ability of numerical models to capture the evolving state of the ground during long term cycling. In addition, calculation strategies must be able to analyse upwards of 10^7 cycles encountered during the lifetime of these offshore structures. The high-cycle accumulation (HCA) constitutive model was first developed by Niemunis et al. (2005) and recently improved and applied to monopiles. Its use requires coupling with a low-cycle constitutive model capable of capturing the incremental stress-strain response of sand, whose behaviour is highly density-, pressure-, fabric-, and strain-level dependent. The high-cycle model then uses information gathered from the low-cycle constitutive model to predict creep-like, cycle-dependent strain accumulation. However, the practical use of the model has been limited by the lack of proven field test comparisons with corresponding laboratory scale tests for parameter calibration. The laboratory and field scale cyclic tests carried out in the joint academic-industry PIle Soil Analysis (PISA) project are re-examined in this work for the calibration of the HCA model. High cycle triaxial tests (Liu, 2018) inform the HCA calibration, where the sensitivity of the model’s log-linear accumulation trend is examined with a focus on assessing lifetime cyclic performance beyond the tested laboratory and field-scale range.