Ship collision events against reinforced concrete offshore structures

Abstract

The number of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWT) is expected to increase significantly in the coming years to face the challenges of the current global decarbonization policies. The use of materials such as Reinforced Concrete in the floating substructures becomes then attractive for reducing both maintenance and chain manufacturing costs, as seen in different industrial scale prototypes such as Floatgen from BW-IDEOL. The non-linear behavior of plain concrete, in addition to numerical complications related to explicit reinforcement modeling, makes the elastic-plastic calculations of these structural elements particularly challenging. In this work, a numerical study of different constitutive concrete models available in the commercial software LS-DYNA is presented, whose capabilities in modeling flexural and shear failure arising from ship collisions events are tested using structural elements with geometrical and mechanical properties similar to those found in current FOWT prototypes.