Seismic Performance of Drag Anchors for the Floating Offshore Wind Turbines

Abstract

In recent years, Taiwan has been actively constructing the offshore wind farms off the west coast of Taiwan. For deeper water region, only the floating offshore wind turbines (OWT) can be used. One way to support the floating OWT would be to use the drag anchors. As Taiwan is a seismically active region, the performance of the drag anchors during earthquakes would be a concern. In this study, we simulate the behavior of the drag anchors subjected to seismic loading through a series of finite element modeling. The first phase of the numerical modeling would be to simulate the installation of the drag anchors. The capacity in this phase would be evaluated and served as reference. Then, in the second phase, seismic loading would be specified and the variation in the anchor capacity would be tracked.