• Journal of Wind Energy
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.21-28
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• 2023

This paper investigates the resistance performance of drag anchors used for aqua farms installed in southwestern offshore wind farms in Korea. These anchors have been employed for a long time without any quantitative evaluation. Experimental campaigns were performed at the target site and the results were used to validate the numerical model by changing the penetration depths in the uniformly distributed seabed (i.e., flat). Based on the validated model with good agreement with the experiments (ARE 1.8 %), the resistance of the anchor with different pullout angles was thoroughly examined. It is worth noting that the Coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian (CEL) technique was applied to account for the large deformation of the anchor; Eulerian for the seabed and Lagrangian for the structure. The numerical results indicated that the pullout resistance is vulnerable to horizontal inclined force rather than vertical inclination, implying that the optimum performance is ideally expected to be 0-degree force applied.