Structure-Seabed Interactions in Marine Environments

Dear Colleagues,

The safety and resilience of offshore development, including exploration of fossil and renewable energy and construction of offshore transportation (e.g., submarine tunnel, and cross-sea bridge), primarily depend on the stability and deformability of the offshore structure. This is critically governed by the complicated interactions between the fluid, offshore structures, and the seabed, which usually exhibit low strength and stiffness under cyclic loadings. Offshore structures include but are not limited to a fixed platform, offshore wind turbine foundations, underwater tunnels, cross-sea bridges, floating facility, and submarine pipelines. Meanwhile, the soil conditions of the seabed are often unusual, particularly in respect of carbonate soils, gassy soils, and structured sensitive soils.

Problem: In marine environments, various offshore structures, foundations, and subsea facilities are often subjected to extreme environmental loadings during hurricanes or typhoons. On the other hand, the weak seabed may not be able to offer sufficient resistance to these extreme loadings. The coupling of the above two issues that results in a failure in fluid–soil–structure interaction (FSSI) is proven to be the main cause for the catastrophes of offshore infrastructures which have occurred in past decades. This has necessitated a fundamental understanding of FSSI, and scientific/design methods for quantifying FSSI, with full considerations of loading characteristics and constitutive behavior of marine sediments.

Current practice: While the great majority of geotechnical engineers still rely on empirical and decoupled models to predict the deformation and stability of offshore structures, there is an increasing trend to develop macro element models by imposing springs at the soil–structure interface. Constitute soil models with an increasing level of complications have been emerging as a subroutine for finite element analysis, which enables modeling of fully coupled offshore structure–seabed interactions. With these great advancements in SSI based on different principles, there is a need to revisit and better identify the key aspects to be considered for offshore structure–soil interaction.

Goal: The scope of this Special Issue is to gather original fundamental and applied research concerning experimental, theoretical, computational, and case studies that contribute toward an understanding and improvement of offshore structure–soil interaction. The topics include but are not limited to SSI associated with problems of:

• Marine sediment characterization;
• Offshore oil and gas production;
• Offshore renewable energy infrastructures;
• Port and coastal disaster prevention;
• Submarine/cross-sea transportation.

Prof. Dr. Dong-Sheng Jeng
Prof. Dr. Zhen Guo
Prof. Dr. Yi Hong
Guest Editors

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