Drained Response of Bucket Foundations under Cyclic Lateral Load

Introduction
The monopod bucket foundation is an innovative support structure for offshore wind turbines. It consists of a shallow embedded foundation which penetrates the seabed by means of a suction created within the caisson. The behaviour of bucket foundations against long-term lateral cyclic loading is by far unexplored, and yet, this is the most common loading condition in offshore environment.
Approach
In this paper the behaviour of bucket foundations with different geometries, under lateral cyclic loading, is explored by means of a small-scale physical model. The scale of the model is 1:50, the soil used is dense sand and the interaction between structure and sand is fully drained. A number of tests on buckets with different skirt length are carried out.
Main body of abstract
The test setup is described and the results are presented. Successively, an analytical model is used to interpret the experimental results. The aim of the study is to explore how the parameters of the analytical model change as a function of the skirt length.
Conclusion
This will elucidate important information on the response of shallow embedded foundations under cyclic loading and, besides, enable a comparison with other kind of foundations in terms of cyclic capacity.