Assessment and Improvement of Buckling Verification Methods for Monopiles

Haj Sassi, Hidaya ; Roth, Attila

4. term

Structural and Civil Engineering, Master

2025

2025-06-04

152 pages

With the rapid development of the offshore wind energy sector, attention has turned to optimising structural design practices. Current analytical methods for buckling verification of wind turbine supporting structures, e.g. monopiles, are suspected to be more conservative than necessary. In light of that, this project intends to assess the appropriacy of the current calculation methods in EN 1993-1-6 to typical monopiles and revise some of the formulations to reduce conservatism. The objective is pursued using a series of FEA of different types. The results show that the analytical methods are in many cases unconservative when only considering typical monopile geometries, support conditions and geometric imperfections. On the other hand, they become rather conservative when taking more realistic internal force distributions into account. Comparing the simplified case of linearly increasing bending moment with that of uniform bending moment reveals an underestimation of capacity of at least 7%. Improved analytical formulations are presented in the report, but the current topic is far from being exhausted, and researchers are thus encouraged to continue the work.

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