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Abstract This study investigates an analytical global buckling solution for steel-concrete-steel sandwich cylinders, which are proposed to be used as the spar substructure for offshore floating wind turbines. Typically, the spar substructures are composed of steel cylinders with a certain amount of concrete as ballast weight. We propose to transform the conventional all-steel cylindrical spar into a steel-concrete-steel sandwich cylindrical spar, in which the spar structural strength can be potentially increased while providing the required weight. A preliminary estimation shows that the steel-concrete-steel structure can reduce the material cost by about 37% and increase the buckling strength by nearly 18% when comparing these with the original design while considering buckling only. However, the buckling strength evaluated in the preliminary study assumed the model with constant thickness under uniform external pressure, which is not a proper model for spar structures. To estimate the buckling strength realistically, this study will derive the analytical buckling solution for sandwich cylindrical structure with non-uniform thickness under varying external pressure. The classical laminated theory and Rayleigh-Ritz method with appropriate approximation displacement functions are used. The proposed solution is validated with commercial finite element software, ABAQUS, and the results show very good agreement with the simulation.
Lin et al. (Sun,) studied this question.