The offshore renewable energy industry requires efficient anchoring systems to support floating offshore wind turbines as well as floating wave energy and tidal turbine devices. This project will extend my recent work on the whole-life time-dependent capacity of anchoring systems – which has revealed potentially significant ‘hidden’ capacity – by opening a collaboration with the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute on consolidation and aging effects. This collaboration will explore new methods to capture long term anchor behaviour for design via laboratory tests through three activities: (i) a program of new soil element tests involving realistic ‘whole-life’ loading, (ii) data mining into NGI’s extensive database of cyclic and long term soil testing and (iii) collaboration on efficient computational models to integrate the anchor into a floating system model. These activities will be facilitated via a placement at NGI, and will lead to both conventional research outcomes and also industry-aimed outputs (webinar and software demo).
