Modular Jacket Concepts for Offshore Wind Farms

The EU-funded research project JABACO aimed at developing modular jacket concepts composed by pre-fabricated steel elements with the intention to lower the cost of energy in offshore wind farms in European waters. At Grid Engineers, we served as the geotechnical engineers expert of the consortium  with the role to analyze the response of the proposed  soil-foundation-wind-turbine systems taking into consideration adverse loading conditions (e.g. seismic loading, extreme wave etc) and provide easy-to-implement design charts for the preliminary dimensioning of  their sea-bed foundations. Our research demonstrated the great potential of suction-caissons as an alternative foundation solutions,  indicated alarming loading conditions that should be taken into consideration in the foundation design and proposed a simplified methodology to include such effects in the design process.