Testing and Modeling of Axial and Lateral Sliding and Mitigation of Deepwater Oil Pipelines

During the service life, network of oil and gas pipelines that connect the floating platforms to the subsea wells in deepwater undergo significant changes in temperature and pressure resulting in high shears, strains, and movement. These pipelines laid on the very soft seabed become susceptible to large movement and lateral buckling resulting in global instability of the entire system. Hence it has become critical to address the issues through combined numerical modeling and experimental study of various conditions in the field. Several full-scale models have been designed and constructed to investigate the behavior of various types of pipes (steel, plastic) on the simulated clayey sea bed (undrained shear strength ranged from 0.01 kPa to 0.11 kPa). Axial and lateral pipe soil interaction characterized and appropriate mitigation solutions proposed. Also the pipe-soil behavior was numerically modeled using the Coupled Eulerian Lagrangian (CEL) and Arbitrary-Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) formulations.