Hydroelastic analysis of floating structures under wave loads

Accurate prediction of hydroelastic response in ocean waves is of great significance to the structural design and reliability design of floating structures. In this paper, based on the potential flow theory, a large floating structure is simplified as a thin-plate material, and the hydrodynamic characteristics of the structure are calculated by using the modal expansion method and the boundary element method. The correctness of the theory and calculation is verified by comparing the experimental and numerical results. Further, the wave properties and structural materials characterization were changed, this paper calculates the stress and deflection of the structure under wave action, and analyzes the effects of hydroelastic response on the safety of the structure.

Fatigue Stress Estimation for Submerged and Sub-Soil Welds of Offshore Wind Turbines on Monopiles Using Modal Expansion

The design of monopile foundations for offshore wind turbines is most often driven by fatigue. With the foundation price contributing to the total price of a turbine structure by more than 30%, wind farm operators seek to gain knowledge about the amount of consumed fatigue. Monitoring concepts are developed to uncover structural reserves coming from conservative designs in order to prolong the lifetime of a turbine. Amongst promising concepts is a wide array of methods using in-situ measurement data and extrapolating these results to desired locations below water surface and even seabed using models. The modal decomposition algorithm is used for this purpose. The algorithm obtains modal amplitudes from acceleration and strain measurements. In the subsequent expansion step these amplitudes are expanded to virtual measurements at arbitrary locations. The algorithm uses a reduced order model that can be obtained from either a FE model or measurements. In this work, operational modal analysis is applied to obtain the required stress and deflection shapes for optimal validation of the method. Furthermore, the measurements that are used as input for the algorithms are constrained to measurements from the dry part of the substructure. However, with subsoil measurement data available from a dedicated campaign, even validation for locations below mud-line is possible. After reconstructing strain history in arbitrary locations on the substructure, fatigue assessment over various environmental and operational conditions is carried out. The technique is found capable of estimating fatigue with high precision for locations above and below seabed.

Dynamic analysis of railway bridges exposed to high-speed trains considering the vehicle–track–bridge–soil interaction

A new semi-analytical approach to analyze the dynamic response of railway bridges subjected to high-speed trains is presented. The bridge is modeled as an Euler–Bernoulli beam on viscoelastic supports that account for the flexibility and damping of the underlying soil. The track is represented by an Euler–Bernoulli beam on viscoelastic bedding. Complex modal expansion of the bridge and track models is performed considering non-classical damping, and coupling of the two subsystems is achieved by component mode synthesis (CMS). The resulting system of equations is coupled with a moving mass–spring–damper (MSD) system of the passing train using a discrete substructuring technique (DST). To validate the presented modeling approach, its results are compared with those of a finite element model. In an application, the influence of the soil–structure interaction, the track subsystem, and geometric imperfections due to track irregularities on the dynamic response of an example bridge is demonstrated.

Variant-Coherence Gaussian Sources

The celebrated Gaussian Schell model source with its shift-invariant degree of coherence may be the basis for devising sources with space-variant properties in the spirit of structured coherence. Starting from superpositions of Gaussian Schell model sources, we present two classes of genuine cross-spectral densities whose degree of coherence varies across the source area. The first class is based on the use of the Laplace transform while the second deals with cross-spectral densities that are shape-invariant upon paraxial propagation. For the latter, we present a set of shape-invariant cross-spectral densities for which the modal expansion can be explicitly found. We finally solve the problem of ascertain whether an assigned cross-spectral density is shape-invariant by checking if it satisfies a simple differential constraint.