Investigating the Uplift Capacity of Offshore Plate Anchors in Spatially Variable Soils

This thesis is focused on investigating the behavior of plate anchors in spatially variable soils. The given topic is important because plate anchors are an affordable and robust solution for offshore deep-water wind farms, which are based on floating platforms and have to be fixed in place by anchors buried in seabed. The main focus of the thesis lies on the investigation of undrained behavior of seabed clay under the uplift action exerted by a plate anchor. The aims of this thesis are: generating spatially variable fields of undrained shear strength, developing a reliable FE modeling approach, gathering results in the form of plate anchor bearing capacity for random fields with different spatial properties, validation of the obtained results with respect to the research papers by O'Neill \cite{ONeill} and Cai \cite{CAI}, conducting a parametric study on the chosen statistical properties of generated fields and introducing a promising normalization scheme for obtained values of plate anchor bearing capacity. The most important finding of this thesis is related to the investigation of the suggested normalization approach, the idea of which is to normalize values of plate anchor bearing capacity with respect to the average soil strength across the critical region, where kinematic failure mechanisms develop.