• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.455-461
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• 2014

The Honam-Jeju, Korea-Japan, and Korea-China subsea tunnel construction projects have drawn significant attention since the early 2000s. These subsea tunnels are much deeper than most existing natural shallow sea tunnels linking coastal areas. Thus, the need for developing new technologies for the site selection and construction of deep subsea tunnels has recently emerged, with the launch of a research project titled "Development of Key Subsea Tunnelling Technology" in 2013. A component of this research, an analysis of deep subsea geological structure, is currently underway. A ground investigation, such as a borehole or geophysical investigation, is generally carried out for tunnel design. However, when investigating a potential site for a deep subsea tunnel, borehole drilling requires equipment at the scale of offshore oil drilling. The huge cost of such an undertaking has raised the urgent need for methods to indirectly assess the local geological structure as much as possible to limit the need for repeated borehole investigations. This study introduces an indirect approach for assessing the geological structure of the seafloor through a submarine bathymetry analysis. The ultimate goal here is to develop an automated approach to the analysis of submarine geological structures, which may prove useful in the selection of future deep subsea tunnel sites.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.233-240
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• 2017

Subsea structures are always vulnerable to accidental risks induced by fishing gear, dropped objects, etc. This paper presents the design of a subsea manifold protective structure that protects against dropped object impacts. Probable dropped object scenarios were established considering the shapes and masses of the dropped objects. A design layout for the manifold protective structure was proposed, with detailed scantlings and material specifications. A method applicable to the pipelines specified in DNV-RP-F107(DNV, 2010) was applied to calculate the annual probabilities of dropped objects hitting the subsea manifold. Nonlinear finite element analyses provided the structural consequences due to the dropped object impacts such as the maximum deflections of the protective structure and the local fracture occurrences. A user-subroutine to implement the three-dimensional fracture strain surface was used to determine whether local fractures occur. The proposed protective structure was shown to withstand the dropped object impact loads in terms of the maximum deflections, even though local fractures could induce accelerated corrosion.

• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.289-296
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• 2018

The offshore subsea platforms are connected to subsea pipelines to transport gas/oil from wells. The pipe is a multilayered structure of polymer and steel for compensating both flexibility and strength. The pipe also requires reinforcement structures to endure the extreme environmental conditions. A vertebrae structure of bend restrictors is one of the reinforcement structures installed to protect the subsea pipe from excessive bending deformations. In this study, structural behaviors of the subsea pipeline with bend restrictors are investigated by the multi-body contact analysis in Abaqus 6.14-2. Contact forces of each bend restrictor extracted from the multi-body contact analysis can be boundary conditions for topology design optimization in Altair Hyperworks 13.0 Hypermesh-Optistruct. Multiple design constraints are considered to obtain a manufacturable design with efficient material usage. Through the multi-body contact analysis with optimized bend restrictors, it is confirmed that the bending performance of the optimized design is enhanced.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.324-332
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• 2018

It is known that damages to the subsea cables used for electric power transmission between islands and countries, including renewable energy from offshore wind power, current, tides, etc., cost much to restore, which causes social and economic losses. Various types of fishing rigs and anchors have been reported to be the greatest hazards to subsea cables. It is possible to design and construct a suitable protection facility for a subsea cable by precisely estimating the underwater behavior of such hazardous apparatuses. In this study, numerical simulations of the underwater behaviors of various hazardous apparatuses were carried out using fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analysis as a basic study to simulate the actual behavior phenomena of hazardous apparatuses in relation to a subsea cable. In addition, the underwater drop characteristics according to the types of hazardous apparatuses were compared. In order to verify the accuracy of the FSI analysis method used in this study, we compared the test results for underwater drops of a steel ball bearing. Stock anchors, stockless anchors, and rocket piles, which were actually reported to be the cases of damage to subsea cables along the southwest coast of Korea, were considered as the hazardous apparatuses for the numerical simulations. Each hazardous apparatus was generated by a Lagrangian model and coupled with the fluid domain idealized by the Eulerian equation to construct the three-dimensional FSI analysis model. The accuracy of the numerical simulation results was verified by comparing them with the analytical solutions, and the underwater drop characteristics according to the types of hazard apparatuses were compared.

• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.49 no.4
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• pp.340-349
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• 2012

The mitigation of gap between technology and it's applicability in the oil and gas industry has led to a rapid development of deepwater resources. Historically, subsea wells have good track records. However, an ever increasing water depths and harsher environments being encountered are currently posing challenges to subsea production. Complex subsea systems are now being deployed in ways rarely encountered in previous development schemes. These increasingly complex systems present a number of technical challenges. This study presents the challenges in subsea production systems, considering the technical and safety issues in design and installation associated with current development modality.

• Ocean Systems Engineering
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.163-179
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• 2020

Considering the huge demand of several types of subsea equipment, as Christmas Trees, PLEMs (Pipeline End Manifolds), PLETs (Pipeline End Terminations) and manifolds for instance, a critical phase is its installation, especially when the equipment goes down through the water, crossing the splash zone. In this phase, the equipment is subject to slamming loads, which can induce impulsive loads in the installation wires and lead to their rupture. Slamming loads assessment formulation can be found in many references, like the Recommended Practice RP-N103 from DNV-GL (2011), a useful guide to evaluate installation loads. Regarding to the slamming loads, RP-N103 adopt some simplifying assumptions, as considering small dimensions for the equipment in relation to wave length, in order to estimate the slamming coefficient C_S used in load estimation. In this article, an experimental investigation based on typical subsea structure dimensions was performed to assess the slamming coefficient evaluation, considering a more specific scenario in terms of application, and some reduction of the slamming coefficient is achieved for higher velocities, with positive impact on operability.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.207-216
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• 2015

Amanifold is one of the essential subsea oil and gas production components to simplify the subsea production layout. It collects the production fluid from a couple of wellheads, transfers it to onshore or offshore storage platforms, and even accommodates water and gas injection flowlines. This paper presents the basic design procedure for a manifold frame structure with novel structural verification using in-house unity check codes. Loads and load cases for the design of an SIL 3 class-manifold are established from a survey of relevant industrial codes. The basic design of the manifold frame is developed based on simple load considerations such as the self weights of the manifold frame and pipeline system. In-house software with Eurocode 3 embedded, called INHA-SOLVER, makes it possible to carry out code checks on the yield and buckling unities. This paper finally proves that the new design of the manifold frame structure is effective to resist a permanent and environment load, and the in-house code is also adaptively combined with the commercial finite element code Nastran.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.36-47
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• 2017

As a typical domestic subsea tunnel construction the Gadeok subsea tunnel applying the method of immersed tunnel has been completed and the Boryeong-Taean subsea tunnel is under construction using NATM. The high-speed railway subsea tunnels between the Honam and Jeju are under consideration, and the feasibility of constructing subsea tunnels with Japan and China is also under consideration. However, it is difficult to provide the process plan information for the construction work such as the analysis of the feasibility of the subsea tunnel and the prediction of the proper construction period because there is no case of domestic construction for it applying the shield TBM method. Due to economic and other reasons, government organizations are reluctant to apply the shield TBM, and there is lack of data on the construction process management field using the shield TBM method. Therefore, a standard construction process management system for the subsea tunnel is needed to analyze the feasibility of the subsea tunnel and to predict the proper construction period. By presenting the standard construction process management system of subsea tunnels such as WBS, Network Diagram, and construction period calculation model, I hope to contribute technically and economically to future subsea tunnel projects.

• Journal of Advanced Research in Ocean Engineering
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.53-58
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• 2017

This study introduces the case of pipelines installed in subsea conditions and buried offshore. Such installations generate pore water pressure under the seabed because of cyclic wave excitation, which is an environmental load, and consistent cyclic wave loading that reduce the soil shear strength of the seabed, possibly leading to liquefaction. Therefore, in view of the liquefaction of the seabed, stability of the subsea pipelines should be examined via calculations using a simple method for buried subsea pipelines and floating structures. Particularly, for studying the possible liquefaction of the seabed in regard to subsea pipelines, high waves of a 10- and 100-year period and the number of occurrences that are affected by the environment within a division cycle of 90 s should be applied. However, when applying significant wave heights (HS), the number of occurrences within a division cycle of 3 h are required to be considered. Furthermore, to research whether dynamic vertical load affect the seabed, mostly a linear wave is used; this is particularly necessary to apply for considering the liquefaction of the seabed in the case of pile structure or subsea pipeline installation.

• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.55 no.2
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• pp.161-168
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• 2018

This paper presents the design procedure of the suction bucket used to support a subsea manifold. The soil-suction bucket interaction numerical analysis technique was verified by comparing the present results with a reference data. In order to simulate the soil-bucket interaction analyses of a subsea manifold structure, various material data such as undrained shear strength, elastic modulus, and poisson ratio of soft clay in Gulf of Mexico were collected from reference survey. We proposed vertical and horizontal design loads based on system weights and current-induced drag forces. Under the assumption that diameter of the suction bucket was 3.0 m considering real dimension of the subsea manifold frame structures, aspect ratio was decided to be 3.0 based on reference survey. The ultimate bearing load components were determined using tangent intersection method. It was proved that the two design load components were less than ultimate bearing loads.