A practical constitutive model for offshore foundation problems involving, dense sands in partially drained to undrained conditions

Despite significant advances in constitutive modelling within academia over the last few decades, the resulting advanced models are seldom used by practising engineers, particularly at the initial stages of design, due to their mathematical complexity, potential numerical instabilities, slow runtimes, and the often large number of model parameters required. From a practical perspective, it is therefore important that constitutive models focus on the features of soil behaviour, which are most likely to drive the overall behaviour of the specific foundation problem in question, with the aim of keeping the model as simple as possible. In this paper, a simple constitutive model is presented, which aims to capture the salient features of the behaviour of dense sand for the analysis of a suction bucket foundation under tension loading. The model was developed for early stage design of a suction bucket in dense sand under rapid loading in which drainage conditions are intermediate between partially drained and undrained. Description of the model calibration procedure is outlined and an example axisymmetric finite element analysis of a suction bucket under tension loading is presented.

Proceedings of the 8th International Conference, 12-14 September 2017, Royal Geographical Society, London, UK