Mechanical model for the analysis of ship collisions against reinforced concrete floaters of offshore wind turbines

This paper presents a simplified mechanical model to study ship collisions against Reinforced Concrete (RC) floaters of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs). The model accounts for the deformability of both striking ships and struck RC structures, including a method to evaluate the elastic–plastic response of RC slabs with normal horizontal restraints, while considering contact area effects and punching shear failure. In the proposed model, the internal mechanics are coupled to the external body dynamics, whilst the hydro-mechanical effects acting on the collided bodies such as hydrostatic restoring, viscous, and wave damping forces are accounted for by the large rotations rigid-body dynamics solver MCOL. A parametric analysis is conducted on the model to study its sensitivity to changes in impact energy, impact location, reinforcement ratios, wall thicknesses, and striker rigidities, whose outcomes are compared with Non-Linear Finite Element (NLFE) simulations. The results show that the proposed model can accurately capture the penetrations in both structures, their body dynamics, and the contact force through the collision at a significantly lower computational cost than their NLFE counterpart.