ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on crashworthiness of jacket foundations used to support offshore wind turbines in moderately deep waters. It describes the methodology followed to perform numerical validations of the theoretical developments, including a description of the finite element models, the computation hypotheses and the simulations performed using Level Set-DYNA code. Some design offices use finite elements simulations to assess the resistance of offshore structures submitted to ship impacts, which provides accurate results but is time-demanding. Many authors performed numerical simulations of a ship colliding an offshore wind turbine jacket to highlight the effect of several parameters. “Analytical” and finite element solvers are used to simulate many ship-jacket collision scenarios. The total resistance and internal energy of the jacket as well as striking ship penetration can finally be post-processed. The boundaries of the jacket into the seabed were considered either perfectly clamped or flexible and then modelled using spring elements associated with in-situ measurements values.
