An investigation of high-order harmonics in the pressure field around a vertical cylinder in steep wave conditions

Offshore structures, encompassing foundations for offshore wind turbines, supports for marine renewable energy devices, bridge piers, and floating vessels, are consistently subjected to severe environmental loads. These loads often dictate the design criteria. Understanding the physics and statistics of wave-structure interaction, especially under non-linear loads experienced in extreme conditions, remains a complex and partially unresolved challenge. Notably, secondary load cycles significantly contribute to the ’ringing’ responses in cylindrical structures, as discussed in previous studies (e.g., Grue et al. (1993), Chaplin et al. (1997)). This paper focuses on analysing loads in focused wave groups, representing short-term extreme wave conditions, on bottom-mounted vertical cylinders relevant to fixed offshore wind turbines. Pressure contour plots over the cylinder’s surface were previously examined by Ghadirian & Bredmose (2020) while studying secondary load cycles. In this research, we adopt the phase-based harmonic separation method for wave forces (Fitzgerald et al. (2014)) to analyse the pressure contour plots. This method effectively isolates harmonic pressure components from the total pressures, enabling a novel exploration of the mechanisms behind secondary load cycles from the perspective of high-order harmonics on the cylinder surface.