Dynamic Performance of Suspended Pipelines with Permeable Wrappers under Solitary Waves

Abstract

Submarine pipelines are widely adopted around the world for transporting oil and gas from offshore fields. They tend to be severely ruined by the extreme waves induced by the natural disaster, such as hurricanes and tsunamis. To maintain the safety and function integrity of the pipelines, porous media have been used to wrap them from the external loads by the submarine environment. The functions of the porous wrappers under the hydrodynamic impact remain to be uncovered before they are widely accepted by the industry. In this study, a numerical wave tank is established with the immersed boundary method as one of the computational fluid dynamics. The submarine pipelines and their porous wrappers are two-way-coupled in terms of displacement and pressure at their interfaces. The impact from the solitary waves, which approximately represent the extreme waves in the reality, on the pipelines with different configurations of the porous wrapper is investigated. The results present significant protective functions of the wrappers on the internal pipelines, transferring the impact forces from the pipelines to the wrappers. The protective effects tend to be enhanced by the porosity and thickness of the wrappers. The influence of the pipeline configurations and the marine environment are then analysed. As for the front pipeline, an increase in the gap leads to a slight increase in the horizontal forces on both the wrapper and the pipeline, but a significant increase in the vertical forces. As for the rear pipeline, because of the shield function of the front pipeline, the velocity within the gap space and the forces on the pipes are decreased with the decrease in the gap size. The complex flow fields around the pipelines with wrappers are also illuminated, implying that the protection function of the wrapper is enhanced by the wave height reduction.