The suction bucket foundation will gradually become one of the basic forms of offshore wind turbines in the future because of its advantages of simple installation, high anti-overturning bearing capacity, material saving and reusability. The current research mainly focuses on the stability analysis of single bucket foundations, and there is little research on the inter-bucket effect and bearing characteristics of multi-bucket foundations. In view of the strength characteristics of the offshore wind turbine foundation, the bearing capacity of horizontal cyclic load is particularly important for the stability of bucket foundation. In this paper, the suction four-bucket foundation was subjected to static bearing capacity model test and series of multi-point cyclic load model experiments under horizontal load, and the foundation failure modes and joint action mechanism of the four-bucket foundation structure on the saturated sand foundation are explored. The innovation of this paper is to carry out model test research on the suction four-bucket wind power foundation, analyze the interaction mechanism and failure mode between the buckets, and explore the influence of multi-point cyclic load on the bearing capacity. So far, few similar studies have been conducted.
Offshore wind energy as an important renewable clean energy, reasonable use of wind energy can effectively alleviate the world's current energy tension and environmental pressure problems. At the same time, the support system of offshore wind power generation is in a more complex environment, and subjected to a variety of environmental loads, how to ensure the safety and reliability of the support system is very important.
Suction bucket foundation is a new type of offshore platform foundation. Because of its advantages of low cost, convenient installation and reusability, it is especially suitable for application in offshore foundation (Wang 2008; Senders 2009; Liu 2016; Xu 2018). The offshore wind power foundation under complex marine environment has to bear the horizontal cyclic load from wind, wave and ice. Therefore, it is particularly important to study the horizontal cyclic bearing performance of the offshore wind turbine bucket foundation (Qu & Wang 2011). However, the current research results mainly focus on the stability analysis of the single-bucket foundation, and there is still no in-depth study on the bearing characteristics and joint working mechanism of the multi-bucket foundation (Liu 2009).
