RESEARCH OUTCOMES

Floating Offshore Wind Turbines, FOWT 2021

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FOWT is a conference organised with the objective to further the advancement of floating wind and to accelerate its implementation into the global renewable energy mix. This event is meant to promote constructive discussions between all actors and stakeholders of this emerging industry. It brings together the sector’s leading experts, researchers and industry leaders for three days to exchange views on the latest technological advances in floating offshore wind energy. The event was a great opportunity to disseminate the project's idea to professionals and policy makers. The potential applications of SEAFLOWER were discussed with offshore professionals, which provided an understanding of the actual needs of the offshore market in Europe.

Researcher's Night 2021, Bologna

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SEAFLOWER participated to the European Researcher's Night organised in Bologna in September 2021. It was an outstanding chance to communicate the project activities to the EU citizens in this event that was held in the lovely historic city centre of the Bologna's campus.

Webinar at COFS 23 September 2021

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A webinar entitled "Meta-modelling techniques for the design of offshore anchor piles" was organised at the COFS of UWA (Perth, WA) to illustrate the initial activities of SEAFLOWER. The seminar was part of the dissemination activities foreseen by the project. The aim was to show the main idea of SEAFLOWER to the COFS's staff to aid the integration of the IF at the start of the outgoing phase of the project.

Seminar at COFS 27 October 2022

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SEAFLOWER (Strategies for the Exploitation of Anchors for FLoating Offshore Wind Energy Reaping) is a research project funded by the Research Executive Agency of the European Commission within the framework of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). Actively taking part to the debate on the future energy supply in Europe, SEAFLOWER aims to support the process of development of effective solutions for floating offshore wind turbines (FOWT) from the geotechnical standpoint through the use of metamodels. Metamodels, also referred to as surrogate or emulation methods, are mathematical functions which allow to replicate the response of complex mechanical models with high accuracy. They are particularly adequate to store the results of computationally onerous numerical analyses making them readily available for parametric studies and for combining with statistical methods. The metamodel application to the field of offshore foundations has great potential, but is new, and still mostly procedural. The concept of SEAFLOWER is illustrated with the results obtained for some case study of different anchoring solutions.

5th International Symposium on Cone Penetration Testing 2022

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The paper presents the development of metamodels for the prediction of the load-displacement response of steel piles driven in sand subjected to pull-out. Two metamodels are created for the evaluation of the tensile capacity and initial stiffness of the pile. They were developed based on the outcomes of a finite element testing campaign, employing models of parameters derived from the tip resistance of cone penetration tests. Two hundreds finite element simulations, which included various soil-pile configurations, were required to calibrate accurate metamodels. Assessment of the procedure was carried out with reference to available data on a model pile and related cone penetration test results. The approach relies on particularly simplified finite element models, but it can be extended to accommodate modelling features of higher complexity. The results find application to the design of offshore piles used as anchors for floating structures.

Indian Symposium on Offshore Geotechnics 2022

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The paper presents a novel procedure to support the preliminary design of anchor piles for floating offshore wind facilities. As Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs) operate in a complex marine environment, under extreme events, they would be subject to load actions from impetuous wind, steep waves and strong currents. Under these conditions, tensile loads transmitted by the FOWT structure may become critical for the piles, particularly when they are used with vertical moorings. The tensile capacity of piles driven in sand is commonly estimated with the use of cone penetration test methods (CPT-methods), while an insight into the deformation can be achieved with the use of load-transfer approaches. However, there are still uncertainties on what should be the most suitable formulation to be used among the available ones. The approach proposed in this work combines Finite Element (FE) and metamodeling techniques to analyse the response of pile anchors driven in sand and subjected to pull-out load. The FE model used in the study is a simple but effective solution to reproduce the response of anchor pile subject to monotonic load and is used to train a metamodel. Differently from FE model, which computational expense limits the use for probabilistic analyses, a metamodel can be used to perform some sensitivity analysis at negligible computational cost. The procedure on how to build a metamodel based on a reliable FE model is here illustrated for open-ended driven piles installed in sand and subjected to drained monotonic tensile loading.