An experimental investigation on the performance of shared pile anchors in saturated sand and clay
An experimental investigation on the performance of shared pile anchors in saturated sand and clay
Shared anchoring, an emerging technology proposed in recent years for floating offshore wind farms, reduces the number of anchors by sharing the anchors between adjacent turbines, thereby reduces the costs for site investigation, fabrication and installation of anchors. Due to phase differences among the different mooring lines of a shared anchor, the resultant force direction varies around the mean direction within an angular range. To shed light on the bearing characteristics of shared pile anchor under this loading condition, results of a series of model tests in saturated sand and clay are reported in this paper. The experimental results in both sand and clay reveal that under multi-directional loading, the failure mechanisms resemble those for fixed-direction loading. The horizontal cumulative displacement of the pile anchor aligns with the mean direction of the resultant force, and its magnitude increases progressively with the number of cycles. Multi-directional loading is shown to accelerate the development of permanent displacement of the anchor under cyclic loading. This effect intensifies with the load level.
Jie Cui; Ying Huang; Chuheng Wu; Youhu Zhang
11th International Conference on Physical Modelling in Geotechnics (ICPMG2026)
Session 6: Onshore and offshore foundation systems
https://doi.org/10.53243/ICPMG2026-83