Issue 51

D. Vasconcelos et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 51 (2020) 24-44; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.51.03 24 Focussed on Structural Integrity and Safety: Experimental and Numerical Perspectives Structural evaluation of the DeepCWind offshore wind platform Diogo Vasconcelos Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal diogo.vasconcelos@tecnico.ulisboa.pt Mário Vieira IDMEC, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal mario.vieira@ist.utl.pt Diogo Dias Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal diogo.r.dias@tecnico.ulisboa.pt Luis Reis IDMEC, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal luis.g.reis@tecnico.ulisboa.pt , http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9848-9569 A BSTRACT . Wind power technologies are being used as a mean of harvesting the energy from the wind with low carbon impact and with great potential to contribute to a new energy paradigm. Great benefits may arise from the use of offshore turbines, such as having a reduced visual impact, if far enough from the coast, or being able to produce more energy due to the use of bigger turbines. Current challenges for these technologies include producing a stable and profitable platform that allow turbines to be installed in deep waters, meaning that these solutions need to be of floating type. An example of such structure is the foundation developed by the DeepCWind consortium, which is evaluated for its structural integrity on this document. The evaluation consists of modal and static/transient analyses, according to a selected Design Loading Case, which is defined for the certification of wind turbines’ offshore foundations. The objective is to observe how this structure would perform when subjected to a simulated real life loading. The DeepCWind foundation exhibited great difficulties enduring the applied loads. Therefore, the structure was reinforced in order to safely undergo the required design loading case. K EYWORDS . Wind energy; Offshore wind; DeepCWind; Offshore foundations. Citation: Vasconcelos, D., Vieira, M., Dias, D., Reis, L., Structural Evaluation of the DeepCWind Offshore Wind Foundation, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 51 (2020) 24- 44. Received: 17.07.2019 Accepted: 11.09.2019 Published: 01.01.2020 Copyright: © 2020 This is an open access article under the terms of the CC-BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.