Seabed ploughing: modelling for infrastructure installation

Completed

Renewable Energy Sources(Ocean Energy)
Renewable Energy Sources(Wind Energy)
Fossil Fuels: Oil Gas and Coal(Oil and Gas, Other oil and gas)
Other Power and Storage Technologies(Electricity transmission and distribution)

Basic and strategic applied research

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (General Engineering and Mineral & Mining Engineering)
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES (Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences)

Not Cross-cutting

Professor C Augarde
Engineering
Durham University

Standard

EPSRC

30 November 2014

31 March 2018

40 months

£290,009

Civil eng. & built environment

North East

NC : Engineering

Professor C Augarde, Engineering, Durham University

Dr W M Coombs, Engineering, Durham University

Project Contact, Soil Machine Dynamics Ltd
Project Contact, Saipem S.p.A., Italy
Project Contact, Lloyds Register EMEA
Project Contact, Cathie Associates Inc, USA

Soil ploughing, an activity carried out by man for thousands of years for agriculture, is now used at a much larger scale on the seabed to connect offshore energy production and generation devices to the supply network. In the next 50 years many more of these offshore devices (wind, wave, current and oil & gas) will be installed, meaning that considerably more seabed ploughing will be undertaken. However, we do not possess the same level of understanding of the mechanical and hydraulic processes associated with soil ploughing as we have developed for other soil-structure interaction problems. This means that ploughing schemes and equipment have to be designed on the basis of semi-empirical and conservative approaches, leading to financial uncertainty. In this project, new computational methods will be applied to the simulation of seabed ploughing to provide better estimates of key parameters such as the towing force and speed of ploughing in a given seabed deposit along with insights into plough stability. Given the likely ploughing activity in the next 20-50 years in UK waters and elsewhere, we expect that this new predictive approach will result in major savings for industry

19/01/15