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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Tom CharltonORCiD, Professor Mohamed Rouainia
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 2019.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.The trend toward deep water energy production has led to a growing use of plate anchors to moor floating production facilities. The effect on anchor uplift behaviour of the inherent spatial variability of soil deposits has so far been little considered, despite having important implications for anchor design. Spatial variability problems are commonly analysed by Monte Carlo simulation but it is difficult to establish the probabilities of failure that are of interest in practice. In this paper, sparse polynomial chaos expansions (SPCEs) are used for moment and reliability analysis of plate anchors in spatially variable undrained clay. A novel two-stage methodology is proposed: in the first stage, an SPCE is constructed to meet a target global error, allowing statistical moments of the uplift capacity to be obtained; in the second stage, an active learning method is used to refine the SPCE for reliability analysis. Anchor uplift capacity is obtained by a finite element method, which is coupled with a random field representation of spatial variability. The effect of embedment depth and the soil-anchor interface is investigated. The failure mechanism of the anchor is shown to have a significant effect on the statistical moments of the uplift capacity and the probability of failure in relation to current design guidelines. To inform future design, factors of safety are presented for a range of failure probabilities.
Author(s): Charlton TS, Rouainia M
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering
Year: 2019
Volume: 120
Issue: 6
Pages: 748-767
Print publication date: 14/10/2019
Online publication date: 03/07/2019
Acceptance date: 12/06/2019
Date deposited: 29/08/2019
ISSN (print): 0029-5981
ISSN (electronic): 1097-0207
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/nme.6155
DOI: 10.1002/nme.6155
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