Seabed ploughing: modelling for infrastructure installation

土壤耕作是人类几千年来为农业进行的一项活动，现在在海底更大规模地使用，将海上能源生产和发电装置与供应网络连接起来。在未来50年内，将安装更多的海上设备（风，波，流和石油和天然气），这意味着将进行更多的海底挖掘。然而，我们不具备相同的水平的理解与土壤耕作相关的机械和水力过程，因为我们已经开发了其他土壤-结构相互作用的问题。这意味着必须根据半经验和保守的方法设计耕作计划和设备，导致财务不确定性。在该项目中，将采用新的计算方法模拟海底犁耕，以便更好地估计在特定海底存款沿着的拖曳力和犁耕速度等关键参数，并深入了解犁耕稳定性。考虑到未来20-50年英国沃茨和其他地方可能的耕作活动，我们预计这种新的预测方法将为工业带来重大节省。

Soil ploughing, an activity carried out by man for thousands of years for agriculture, is now used at a much larger scale on the seabed to connect offshore energy production and generation devices to the supply network. In the next 50 years many more of these offshore devices (wind, wave, current and oil & gas) will be installed, meaning that considerably more seabed ploughing will be undertaken. However, we do not possess the same level of understanding of the mechanical and hydraulic processes associated with soil ploughing as we have developed for other soil-structure interaction problems. This means that ploughing schemes and equipment have to be designed on the basis of semi-empirical and conservative approaches, leading to financial uncertainty. In this project, new computational methods will be applied to the simulation of seabed ploughing to provide better estimates of key parameters such as the towing force and speed of ploughing in a given seabed deposit along with insights into plough stability. Given the likely ploughing activity in the next 20-50 years in UK waters and elsewhere, we expect that this new predictive approach will result in major savings for industry.