Nominated for the Bernt Johansson Outstanding Paper Awards at Nordic Steel 2019
A state-of-the-art framework for the design of jacket foundations for offshore wind turbines is presented here. The article illustrates how an efficient, yet highly accurate, structural model can be achieved through a combination of a comprehensive beam finite element model and detailed shell/solid finite element models, where the former suffices for representing the overall global behaviour and the latter improves the representation of non-trivial structural details such as the transition piece and tubular joints. This approach allows the verification of standard structural elements according to various design codes to be automated on beam element level, while the fatigue performance via the hot-spot method as well as detailed stress and buckling analyses of relevant joints and details can be performed based on the detailed shell/solid finite element models readily available for stiffness representation. The computational framework ensures full consistency between the local and global description levels and an efficient cloud interface facilitates the thousands of design load cases that typically require consideration in order that a full detailed design can be simulated within a reasonable timeframe.