Assessment of Practical Methods to Predict Accumulated Rotations of Monopile-Supported Offshore Wind Turbines in Cohesionless Ground Profiles

Monopiles supporting offshore wind turbines can experience permanent non-recoverable rotations (or displacements) during their lifetime due to the cyclic nature of hydrodynamic and aerodynamic loading exerted on them. Recent studies in the literature have demonstrated that conventional cyclic p–y curves recommended in different codes of practice (API-RP-2GEO and DNVGL-RP-C212) may not capture the effects of long-term cyclic loads as they are independent of the loading profile and the number of applied cycles. Several published methodologies based on laboratory scaled model tests (on sands) exist to determine the effect of cyclic lateral loads on the long-term behaviour of piles. The tests vary in terms of the pile behaviour (rigid or flexible pile), number of applied loading cycles, and the load profile (one-way or two-way loading). The best-fit curves provided by these tests offer practical and cost-efficient methods to quantify the accumulated rotations when compared to Finite Element Method. It is therefore desirable that such methods are further developed to take into account different soil types and the complex nature of the loading. The objective of this paper is to compare the performance of the available formulations under the actions of a typical 35-h (hour) storm as per the Bundesamt für Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie (BSH) recommendations. Using classical rain flow counting, the loading time-history is discretized into load packets where each packet has a loading profile and number of cycles, which then enables the computation of an equivalent number of cycles of the largest load packet. The results show that the loading profile plays a detrimental role in the result of the accumulated rotation. Furthermore, flexibility of the pile also has an important effect on the response of the pile where predictions obtained from formulations based on flexible piles resulted in a much lower accumulated rotation than tests based on rigid piles. Finally, the findings of this paper are expected to contribute in the design and interpretation of future experimental frameworks for Offshore Wind Turbine (OWT) monopiles in sands, which will include a more realistic loading profile, number of cycles, and relative soil to pile stiffness.