Simulation Software Development For Surface Tow Method Of Submarine Pipeline Construction

As one of the most important resource of modern industry, the exploration and development of oil and gas has got much attention. With the discovery of more and more ocean oil field, the facilities such as drilling platform, production platform and oil storage platform have been constructed in offshore areas. For the sake of transporting the ocean oil to the land or collecting oil in the offshore oil field, submarine pipelines are widely used as a transportation mean with high efficiency and safety, low cost, and large capacity.Since the submarine pipelines are installed on or under the seabed, it is difficult for detection and maintenance. Thereby, the whole process such as construction, laying and operation of submarine pipelines has to be studied. The operational costs of pipe laying ships is high, and the most of offshore oil fields are located in shallow water in China, therefore, towing method of the offshore pipeline construction is utilized.The hand calculation can not satisfy the requirements of modern engineering design and analysis. With the fast development of software engineering and numerical methods, more and more computing softwares are becoming the important tools of engineers.Based on the review of the methods of construction of offshore pipelines, the process of surface tow method is introduced in detail. Using VS2010software with a powerful object-oriented programming function, a software, Simulation Analysis of Surface Tow Method (SASTM), with efficiency, user friendly interface is developed on the base of the VB.NET programming language.SASTM is composed of three modules including pre-processing module, calculation module and post-processing module. The development principles, design ideas and main functions of the software are described in detail. This software can carry out not only the analysis of towing process, but also the functions of laying process.A variety of pipe types can be selected, and the buoys and tugboats, specific construction conditions and environmental loadings are taken into account. The numerical results such as deformations, internal forces and stresses can be shown on the interfaces. Meanwhile, the instructions and help files are provided as the form of a text file.SASTM is an accurate, efficient and user friendly software through the practice in actual projects.