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Abstract

The objective of the present work is to understand the crushing behavior of a predefined wind turbine jacket when it is impacted by a ship. To investigate the resulting deformation modes and the repartition of dissipated energy, nonlinear finite element analyses are performed to simulate both rigid and deformable ships colliding the jacket at different velocities. In a first part, a sensitivity analysis to the jacket impacted area is carried out to find the most damaging situation. Then, the influences of gravity loads, wind force, and soil stiffness are studied, considering that the striking ship is rigid. In a second part, the jacket is supposed to be collided by two different deformable vessels and the internal energy distribution between the jacket and the striking ships is analyzed for different jacket leg thicknesses. Some numerical analyses focus also on the transfer of the crushing force between the impacted leg to the others through the braces. All these numerical results will further serve to fix the hypotheses for the development of a simplified tool based on analytical formulations.

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