The analysis of crashworthiness and dissipation mechanism of novel floating composite honeycomb structure against ship-OWT collision

High-energy ship collisions can cause catastrophic damage to offshore wind turbines (OWTs). This paper proposes a novel floating composite honeycomb anti-collision structure to reduce damage caused by ship-OWT high-energy collisions. The typical collision scenarios are conducted to investigate the damage analysis of anti-collision structures and the dynamic response of OWT with and without anti-collision structures via ABAQUS/Explicit. Regarding the configuration of the composite honeycomb anti-collision structure, the elastic-plastic theory of sandwich beams is proposed and an elastic-plastic analysis on the sandwich wall honeycomb core structure is performed to investigate its dissipation mechanism and obtain homogeneous material parameters of the cells. The homogenization parameters are incorporated into the ship-OWT anti-collision analysis to evaluate their applicability. The collision simulation results demonstrate that the proposed anti-collision structure is capable of effectively absorbing 80% of the initial kinetic energy and significantly reducing the dynamic response of the structure. In elastic-plastic analysis, the proposed elastic-plastic theory of sandwich beams effectively addresses the elastic-plastic behavior of honeycomb with sandwich walls, yielding results consistent with the stress-strain curve obtained from finite element analysis (FEA). In the coupled analysis, the obtained parameters of the homogenized honeycomb validate its effectiveness and enhance computational efficiency. Valuable results are given for the engineering design.