APPLICATION TO DESIGN OF MARINE FOUNDATIONS OF A COMPLETE MODEL FOR CYCLIC BEHAVIOUR OF SOILS

A sophisticated model called CYCLADE has been developed to describe behaviour of soils under cyclic loading and carefully checked against laboratory tests results. This paper concerns an application of CYCLADE in a finite element programme to analyse offshore foundations when submitted to cyclic loading. A validation of the model is proposed with the calculation of a centrifuge experiment on a footing resting on sand and cyclicly loaded. Then, a jackup spudtank resting on a stiff clay and submitted to cyclic loadings representing 60% and 80% of the one hundred years wave is analysed incrementally up to 125 cycles with the FEM model. Results are discussed in detail and compared with predictions of the usual global method for calculating foundations under cyclic loading.