ABSTRACT
The increasing need for renewable energy has led to a substantial growth of the offshore wind industry. To meet the need of the demanding timelines of the industry, while maintaining a thorough and robust design of the offshore foundations, automation is key in supporting rapid and accurate geotechnical screening of any investigated site. The preliminary design of foundations for offshore wind turbines is a crucial step to determine the feasibility of the planned structures to build an offshore wind park at the site. Therefore, an initial estimate of the ground conditions, in terms of both soil stratigraphy as well as soil strength and stiffness properties are necessary. This contribution presents a MATLAB-based tool which performs an automatic interpretation and statistical evaluation of soil conditions based on solely cone penetration testing (CPT) data. The tool derives a preliminary ground model by assembly of similar soil type and strength and stiffness parameters are determined through available CPT correlations. A depth-dependent statistical evaluation of the strength and stiffness parameters for each soil layer in the respective soil profile is computed. The output profiles can be adopted directly for the preliminary design of offshore foundations such as jacket pin-piles, suction bucket or monopiles using the PISA rule-based method.
