
Cathie Associates
Cathie Associates
1 Projects, page 1 of 1
assignment_turned_in Project2014 - 2018Partners:Cathie Associates, Lloyds Register EMEA, Saipem limited, Lloyds Register EMEA, Durham University +6 partnersCathie Associates,Lloyds Register EMEA,Saipem limited,Lloyds Register EMEA,Durham University,Lloyd's Register EMEA,Soil Machine Dynamics UK,Cathie Associates,Saipem limited,Durham University,Soil Machine Dynamics UKFunder: UK Research and Innovation Project Code: EP/M000397/1Funder Contribution: 290,009 GBPSoil 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.
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