Geotechnical engineers must design foundations for offshore wind turbine under a large deal of uncertainties, which could lead to finite probability of the foundation failing in a storm.
If you have a budget to spend, which parameter you seek more information. For example, inadequate metocean data or the vague soil property definition concerns you more. Or, there is something else which is more worrying?
I think you pretty much identified the two crucial uncertainties.
Structures very often fail because of inadequate connection design. Therefore getting the connections right, especially at the foundations level, will be an uncertainty to deal with. Incidentally and crucially, such uncertainty depends directly on both metocean data and soil property definition.
Dear colleagues
Soil is undoubtedly offer the highest challenge when it comes to uncertainty in design. I found a few references I thought you might be interested in:
http://infomar.ie/documents/Research/INF-11-24-DOH.pdf
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/cee/files/2014_IET_Article.pdf
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