Dynamic Seabed Response Around Wind Turbine Foundation: Donghai Offshore Wind Farm China

Donghai offshore wind farm, the first and largest commercial operating offshore wind energy system in China, adopted a novel foundation–high-rising structure foundation. In this paper, a three-dimensional porous model, based on Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations and Biot’s poro-elastic theory, was developed by integrating 3D wave and seabed models to simulate wave-induced seabed response around the high-rising structure foundation. Then, a parametric study for the wave and seabed characteristics on the foundation stability was conducted. The numerical results concluded from the numerical analysis were as follows: (i) the existence of structure had a significant effect on the wave transformations and the distributions of wave-induced pore pressures; (ii) the magnitude of wave-induced pore pressure increased as wave height or wave period increased; (iii) the dissipation rate of pore pressure increased as the degree of saturation decreased.