Monopile Forever: Overcoming the Technical Boundaries of Monopile Foundations in Deep Waters

Since the introduction of the first offshore wind farm in 1991, the demand for offshore renewable wind energy has experienced exponential growth all around the world. To supply this demand, the power rating and corresponding dimensions of offshore wind turbines have grown significantly. Due to the ever-shrinking availability of easily accessible shallow water sites and the abundance of high quality wind resources in deeper water, the industry is stimulated to come up with innovative, yet cost effective, solutions to tap into these deep water sites. Historically, the use of monopile foundations has been an important facilitator of cost reduction due to its relative ease of manufacturability, transportability and installability. Monopile foundations have, however, thus far only been used in relatively shallow water depths. With jacket-type and floating support structures remaining relatively costly, the question arises if the monopile could yet be scaled up further to be used in water depths beyond the current 40-60mfor future, 10+ MW wind turbines. The goal of this research is to investigate the technical feasibility of monopile foundations in the water depth ’gap’ of 60 to 120 meters, which is currently claimed by jackets, for large wind turbines and determine critical design parameters for up-scaling monopiles to these depths. With an eye on future developments a 15 MW reference turbine is adopted and to make the research widely applicable the Hywind Scotland site in the Northern North Sea is selected, a well-documented reference site with a very severe wind and wave climate. To define monopile designs, a parametric (static) monopile geometry optimization tool is developed in Excel, which transfers the environmental data to forcing components. The monopile geometry is optimized for first natural frequency and ULS resistance (yield and global buckling) by varying the outer diameter and wall thickness along the structure. It was found that the ULS check is governed b
Offshore and Dredging Engineering