Incorporating Engineering Criteria to the Synthesis and Optimization of Submarine Pipeline Routes: On-Bottom Stability, VIV-Induced Fatigue and Multiphase Flow

Abstract

In offshore field development it is extremely important to plan the submarine pipeline route for the hydrocarbons transportation. To ensure an expedited project, researchers from Petrobras and LAMCSO/COPPE/UFRJ have been involved in the development and implementation of a computational tool, based on Evolutionary Algorithms, for the synthesis and optimization of submarine pipeline routes. In this tool, each candidate route is evaluated in terms of several criteria that are incorporated in an objective function, to take into account the relevant aspects that should be considered in the design of a route, such as the pipeline length, bathymetry data, obstacles, number and length of free spans and others. Previous works described the incorporation of engineering criteria related to on-bottom stability and VIV-induced fatigue in free spans for pipes under the action of hydrostatic and hydrodynamic environmental loads of current and waves. Now, this work presents more examples of applications related to this latter criterion, and focus on the incorporation of a production criterion related to the pressure drop due to multiphase fluid flow, according to correlations for inclined pipelines. The goal is to obtain a robust tool to reduce the design time and minimize the cost of the pipeline route, leading to an optimal route configuration complying with various engineering criteria that, on a traditional design procedure, would be checked separately only after the definition of the route.