FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS ON ENERGY DISSIPATION OF GEO-MATERIALS INCURRED BY IMPACTING LOAD

The seabed pipeline can possibly be damaged by weights dropping from ocean platforms or anchors from commercial ships. The commonly adopted method to protect the pipelines is to cover the pipeline with a layer of geo-materials, such as crushed stone, sand or clay, which can dissipate part of the energy of the falling objects. The non-linear finite element program Ls-DYNA/ANSYS is applied to simulate numerically the capacity for the geo-materials to dissipate the energy of the falling objects. The calculation results for the crushed stone coincide well with those recommended by the current Code of DNV-rp-f107_2010 that is based on experiment data, which proves the feasibility of using this program to estimate the energy dissipating capacity of the geo-materials. Because little research has been performed with clay soil, the program Ls-DYNA/ANSYS is used to predict the energy dissipating capacity of clay layers. The achievement can be referred by the seabed pipeline protection design.