Pullout Capacity of Strip Anchors in Spatially Variable Soil. I: Clay

Natural soils often exhibit significant spatial variability due to their geological history of soil formation. As an attractive anchoring solution for floating offshore structures, this paper has investigated the pullout capacity of strip plate anchors in clay considering the inherent soil spatial variability. In this study, the soil properties were represented by random fields, and an analytical framework was developed to estimate the first two moments and the probability density function of the pullout capacity factor for shallowly and deeply embedded anchors. The analytical approach was validated by the random finite element method (RFEM) over a wide range of soil and anchor parameters. The results show that the coefficient of variation and correlation length of the soil significantly affect the prediction of anchor pullout capacity, providing evidence that sufficient site investigation is of great importance for cost-effective and reliable anchor design. Probabilistic charts were also developed to aid in the probabilistic analysis of anchor pullout capacity. Overall, the developed analytical framework can be used as a good approximation to the computationally intensive RFEM.