• Schlue, Benjanmin F.
• Hepp, Daniel A.
• Mörz, Tobias
• Kopf, Achim J.
• Kreiter, Stefan
• Ossig, Ben
• Hebig, Jan
• Otto, Daniel

Abstract

Failure caused by cyclic loading is a major concern for the design of offshore wind turbine foundations. However, no generally accepted procedure exists to evaluate the risk of cyclic failure during soil exploration, laboratory testing programs and resulting foundation design. As an example, we here present the results from a cyclic triaxial test program on sediment from the Innogy Nordsee 1 offshore wind farm area. All samples for the cyclic experiments were selected on the basis of a preliminarily assumed static design and tested in cyclic multistress level experiments. The actual soil behavior is found to be dependent on the cyclic stress level. A comparison of stress levels of the preliminary design and the measured soil behavior leads to the conclusion that plastic deformation caused by cyclic loading is to be expected. Moreover the behavior of cyclic sensitive sand and cyclic robust cohesive sediments from the offshore wind farm area is presented and possible design procedures are discussed.

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• polymer
• experiment