Joint industry project set-up to increase understanding of monopile buckling to extend lifetime of offshore wind assets

The Verification of Buckling Assessment and Behaviour in Large Monopiles (VERBATIM) project is a €3 million joint industry initiative, due to be completed by early 2023.

 

Currently, the predominant substructure for offshore wind turbines is the monopile foundation. As turbines continue to get bigger, the supporting monopiles become larger in size with diameters beyond 10m and lengths over 60m. These large monopiles have a higher risk of buckling below the seabed as the impact hammers used for installation and the forces exerted on the monopile have increased. To mitigate this potential risk, the industry has adopted greater wall thickness.

 

Increasing understanding of how monopiles behave during installation, and the potential defects that may reduce the lifetime of an offshore wind asset, could result in reduced wall thickness allowing safe, optimised structures, whilst also lowering costs.

 

Developers have to ensure that a monopile can be driven into the seabed without creating any structural defects. To date, current design practices have ensured successful pile installation without pile-tip buckling or refusal. As monopiles become larger, the development of an enhanced design procedure to deliver safe and cost-effective foundations becomes increasingly important.  Pile buckling has to be prevented as a key priority, using economic and time efficient methods.

With majority funding from the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy (BMWi), the project is part of the 7th Energy Research Programme of the German Federal Government, administrated by Projektträger Jülich (PTJ). The VERBATIM project further benefits from technical and financial industry support provided by the Offshore Wind Accelerator partners: EnBW, Equinor, RWE, Ørsted, Scottish Power Renewables, Shell and Vattenfall.

 

The project is being conducted by BAM, German’s Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, the Technical University of Berlin and JBO with support from the Carbon Trust. VERBATIM is investigating potential pile-tip buckling phenomena during installation and buckling instabilities of the embedded pile near the mud-line. The objectives are to: