A numerical study for predicting the capacity of skirted foundations in clay subjected to cyclic loading

ABSTRACT

Skirted foundation is widely applied in the design of offshore structures. A large number of studies have been carried out to examine the failure envelope of the skirted foundation, but most of them focused on the static loading conditions without considering the effect of cyclic load and providing cyclic failure envelopes. Therefore, this paper proposes a numerical framework to predict the cyclic bearing capacity of the skirted foundation based on the dynamic strength curves and the probe loading method, which is modified so that it can be applied to the cyclic failure envelope calculation. It was found that the cyclic uniaxial capacity is affected by initial average load, number of cycles, and cyclic load amplitude. Cyclic load has a limited impact on the shapes of the failure envelope under combined loading and the degree of its scaling is related to the cyclic degradation ratio controlled by the dynamic strength curves.

KEYWORDS:

• Skirted foundation
• cyclic degradation
• failure envelope
• offshore engineering

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hainan Provincial Joint Project of Sanya Yazhou Bay Science and Technology City [2021JJLH0088]; the Open Fund of State Key Laboratory of Hydraulic Engineering Simulation and Safety, Tianjin University [grant number HESS-2105]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 51809209].