Offshore wind turbines (OWTs) subjected to the ocean wind and wave excitations and the resulting response can be described by coupled aero and hydrodynamic, including turbine motor rotationvibration and soil-structure interaction. To consider these complexities, the coupled advanced design methods, combining aero-hydro-servo-elastic mechanical design approaches, have been developed and implemented to the industry. However, nonlinear behaviour of soil-structure interaction (i.e., subsurface foundation) modelling has hardly been included in these methods, resulting in underestimation of foundation stiffness, damping and poor agreement between measured and predicted behavior of OWTs in operation. In this study, the nonlinear analyses of a newly developed hybrid monopile, which is the monopile combined with suction bucket foundation at the seabed, are carried out by using nonlinear three-dimensional FEA (Finite Element Analysis) tool. The FEA tool is a simplified approach that is particularly developed for efficient analyses of cylindrical foundation geometries taking non-symmetric (horizontal and moment) loads and hysteretic damping into account for a simplified hybrid-monopile. The calculated FEA results are further compared with the behavior of the scaled monopile and hybrid-monopile tested under 1g centrifuge model tests.
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Shin et al. (2024) studied this question.