Design of suction piles

With oil exploration and production advancing to deepwater, floating offshore

structures
are being designed to cope with the mounting challenges presented by the marine
environment. The Tension Leg Platform (TLP) shown in Fig. 1, is one of these floating
structures. In order to attach the platform to the foundation at the sea bottom, tendons
under tension are used. Consequently, it is very important to have a good estimate of
the
tensile or pull-out capacity for the foundations of such structures.

In recent years, suction piles, also called suction caissons, have been introduced
as alternative foundations for TLPs and other offshore structures. To have a better
understanding of the behavior of these foundations, in situ tests and laboratory
tests have been performed. Also, some numerical analyses have been carried out
However these analyses attempt to determine the capacity of the foundations by
resorting to assumptions regarding the state of stress after the caissons are in place.
The purpose of the procedure described in this paper is to estimate the tensile capacity
of suction piles taking into account the installation process. In order to verify the