Suction Caissons Optimization Through Caissons Arrangement And Modeling

Offshore wind turbines have has greatly improved throughout their life span with increasing energy capacity over 1 GW.Due to the passage of time,large scale structures have been implemented and a huge factor is the cost reduction of offshore wind energy.Offshore wind turbine foundations have been given less preference by researchers.Most of them are for mono-pile foundations of non-homogeneous clay soils and have no cost reduction simulation analysis.Offshore sandy soils have not considered which has also a huge effect on those types of regions.This may lead to our lack of information on tripod caisson geometry in sandy clays and cost-effectiveness for different L/D ratios.Since there are many ways to get an optimized design,this thesis presents the study of tripod caisson geometry by analyzing the response of different dimensions under homogeneous soil to get exact effect of the only structure under heavy load using numerical simulations.To acquire the model parameters mono-pod caisson is used in two types of soil for later used in tripod optimization method.Further tangent intersection line method used to describe the bearing capacities for tripod caisson.A series of simulations have been performed to get an optimized model for cost analysis which includes a combined force effect on tripod caisson.Different L/D ratios of caisson geometry,loading direction of wind,S/D ratios,turbine hub installation place and volume of steel have been discussed in this study to get the optimized design.Some major conclusions for OWT caissons are given below:· Best loading direction would one caisson in push and two caissons in pull mechanism· Preferred loading position is at the center of the tripod· A distance of caisson S/D = 2.5 found to be better· L/D preferred to be in between 1 to 1.5Furthermore,after getting the optimized dimensions,the model has been simulated in OptumG3 and comparison has been performed with plaxis and optumG3 results.After that real-life reference problem analyzed in plaxis to check the optimized caisson dimension and results have been drawn out.It was concluded that foundation modeling is an important topic in offshore wind turbine research and development.Neglecting all structure parameters gives us an unreliable analysis for cost reductions in offshore wind turbine structures.