Assessment and Improvement of Buckling Verification Methods for Monopiles
Translated title
Vurdering og Forbedring af Eftervisningsmetoder for Foldning i Monopæle
Authors
Term
4. term
Education
Publication year
2025
Submitted on
2025-06-04
Pages
152
Abstract
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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