• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.81-87
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• 2018

The seismic response, the natural frequencies and the mode shapes of an offshore wind turbine with twisted tripod substructure subject to various pile-ground interactions are discussed in this paper. The acceleration responses of the tower head by four historical earthquakes are presented as the seismic response, while the other loads are assumed as ambient loads. For the pile-ground interactions, the fixed, linear and nonlinear models are employed to simulate the interactions and the p-y, t-z and Q-z curves are utilized for the linear and nonlinear models. The curves are designed for stiff, medium and soft clays, and thus, the seven types of the pile-ground interactions are used to compare the seismic response, the acceleration of the tower head. The mode shapes are similar to each other for all types of pile-ground interactions. The natural frequencies, however, are almost same for the three clay types of the linear model, while the natural frequency of the fixed support model is quite different from that of the linear interaction model. The wind turbine with the fixed support model has the biggest magnitude of acceleration. In addition, the nonlinear model is more sensitive to the stiffness of clay than the linear pile-ground interaction model.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.125-132
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• 2019

This paper presents a seismic reliability analysis method for an offshore wind turbine with a twisted tripod support structure under earthquake loading. A three dimensional dynamic finite element model is proposed to consider the nonlinearity of the ground-pile interactions and the geometrical characteristics of the twisted tripod support structure where out-of-plane displacement occurs even under in-plane lateral loadings. For the evaluation of seismic reliability, the failure probability was calculated for the maximum horizontal displacement of the pile head, which is calculated from time history analysis using artificial earthquakes for the design return periods. The application of the subset simulation method using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo(MCMC) sampling is proposed for efficient reliability analysis considering the limit state equation evaluation by the nonlinear time history analysis. The proposed method can be applied to the reliability evaluation and design criteria development of the offshore wind turbine with twisted tripod support structure in which two dimensional models and static analysis can not produce accurate results.