Panagiota Tasiopoulou, Yannis Chaloulos, Nikos Gerolymos, Amalia Giannakou and Jacob Chacko have co-authored a paper titled: “Cyclic Lateral Response of OWT Bucket Foundations in Sand: 3D Coupled Effective Stress Analysis with Ta-Ger Model” which has been published in Soils and Foundations. In this paper, the multiaxial sand constitutive model Ta-Ger (Tasiopoulou and Gerolymos, 2016a,2016b) implemented in the finite deference code FLAC3D is employed in the analysis of the lateral response of bucket (skirted) foundations subjected to wind/wave loading. The model has been adjusted to reproduce the cyclic response of sand for undrained, fully drained and the intermediate conditions, using a unique set of calibration parameters. Numerical validation is conducted against centrifuge test including a bucket foundation in dry sand, by building a 3D numerical model.
In order to gain qualitative insights into the effect of drainage conditions, the same problem used for validation was analyzed under saturated conditions and a range of soil permeabilities. It was shown that when flow is allowed the response up to a cycle threshold resembles that of fully drained conditions. Increasing the permeability delays the occurrence of liquefaction and the associated development of large deformations. You can find it online here!