Marine Cable Structures

An efficient method for the static and dynamic analysis of marine cable structures is presented. These structures may consist of floating platforms, buoys, weights, anchors, ect., interconnected by arbitrary arrangements of cables and flexible pipes. Displacements or forces can be specified at any number of nodal points and wave or current interaction can be simulated. The efficiency of the method has been demonstrated by serveral applications: dynamic response of a deepwater oil production platform, anchor drop, sonar towing, dynamic stiffness of mooring lines, tankers loading systems with flexible pipes, etc. Because the analysis technique is based on simple long curved cable elements, it outperforms all the currently available methods which use series of short straight links to model the cables.