Ship collision on monopile offshore wind turbines

Every year, the offshore wind industry is expanding and the location of the future wind farms tends to move to deeper waters and closer to the traffic lanes. The consequence of this growth is that the probability of ship collisions will increase. For any new offshore wind farm projects, a collision risk analysis must be performed in order to identify the collision scenarios having the greatest probabilities of occurrence and to evaluate the consequences on the supporting structure and also on the mechanical parts of the wind turbines. The goal of this paper is to outline the behaviour of the monopile foundations during ship collision by performing non-linear finite elements simulations. Many collision scenarios are analysed in order to study the sensitivity of the monopile to a series of parameters like impact velocity of the striking ship, wind loads and soil stiffness.