Punch-Through Risk Assessment of Spucans Considering Soil Spatial Correlations

Acomprehensive understanding of the geological conditions at the penetration site is necessary to prevent punch-through accidents of spudcan foundations for the offshore mobile jack-up oil platform.However, the high cost of marine geotechnical survey limits the quantity and area of geological data, which poses great challenges for spudcan site selection and risk assessment. To address this issue, a framework for rapid geological parameter assessment is proposed in this studyto estimate the geological conditions at unsampled area, which are further applied to the punch-through risk analysis of the spudcan.The results show that the maximum relative error between estimatedsoil parameters and the measured soil parameters is 12.9%. The punch-through risk analysis based on estimated soil parameters is in close agreement with that derived from measured parameters.This study provides important assistance for the decision-making of spducan site selection and relocation in the sparse-data areas.

Keywords: Spudcan, Punch-through, Kriging interpolation, Soil spatial correlations, Sparse data.