A finite element implementation for cohesive soils of PISA design model for offshore wind turbines foundations

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In the offshore energy industry, the lateral soil-pile interaction has been traditionally modelled by means of springs calibrated by non-linear and depth dependent soil reaction curves known as p-y curves.
It became evident that this approach led to an underestimation of the lateral stiffness of monopiles of relatively low values of length-to-diameter ratio that are typically adopted for offshore wind turbine structures, resulting in an underestimation of the eigenfrequencies and generally oversizing of the foundation structures.
Updated methods are now commonly implemented in the industry. One of the methods was developed in the framework of the PISA project, based on onshore lateral pile tests in both sand and clay. The enhanced soil response curves based on PISA method need to be calibrated against the results of full 3D Finite Element simulations of the soil-pile interaction. In cohesive soils, this was undertaken by running numerical analyses using advanced soil models not commercially available, calibrated considering the pile tests results conducted in stiff clay till of the Cowden site.
Different approaches were proposed aiming to replicate the PISA JIP outcome by adopting commercially available soil models with reasonable results but never fully comparable to the in-situ pile tests results in cohesive soils.
In this paper, a calibration procedure is proposed for the commercially available Hardening Soil with Small Strain soil model. The model calibration is tested by simulating the pile tests conducted in Cowden till. Results of the lateral pile response show good matching with the full-scale pile test data.

5th International Symposium on Frontiers in Offshore Geotechnics (ISFOG2025)

8 - Monopile design to lateral monotonic loads