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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Tom CharltonORCiD, Professor Mohamed Rouainia
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).
Suction caissons are increasingly used in offshore energy production to moor floating facilities in deepwater. The holding capacity of a suction caisson is dependent on the angle of the mooring line and is oftendescribed in terms of a vertical-horizontal (VH) load interaction diagram, or failure envelope. Theseenvelopes have commonly been defined by numerical methods using deterministic soil parameters,ignoring the natural spatial variability of seabed sediments. In this paper, spatial variability is modelledusing a random field and coupled with finite element analysis to obtain a probabilistic characterisation ofholding capacity. The increase of strength with depth that is characteristic of a marine clay is taken intoaccount. A non-parametric approach using kernel density estimation is presented for constructing probabilistic VH failure envelopes that allow an appropriate envelope, associated with an acceptable level ofrisk, to be selected for design. A study of the autocorrelation distance, a quantity often difficult to obtainaccurately in practice, has shown that the vertical autocorrelation distance has a much greater influenceon the variability of holding capacity than the horizontal and should be carefully chosen in offshore.applications
Author(s): Charlton TS, Rouainia M
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Computers and Geotechnics
Year: 2016
Volume: 80
Pages: 226–236
Print publication date: 01/12/2016
Online publication date: 18/08/2016
Acceptance date: 02/06/2016
Date deposited: 26/09/2016
ISSN (print): 0266-352X
ISSN (electronic): 1873-7633
Publisher: Pergamon Press
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compgeo.2016.06.001
DOI: 10.1016/j.compgeo.2016.06.001
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