Development and Validation of a Coupled Eulerian Lagrangian Finite Element Ice Scour Model

Pipelines in the arctic offshore must be installed and buried below the seabed to avoid direct contact, and to mitigate the effects of strains induced by soil displacement below the ice keel scour depth. A three-dimensional (3D) finite element (FE) model that utilizes the Coupled Eulerian Lagrangian (CEL) formulation has been developed to provide direct and explicit estimation of pipe stresses and strains. The CEL formulation is novel, and no published work has attempted to explore its capabilities and potential for ice scour modeling to date. The developed model will be helpful in solving some of the uncertainty regarding pipeline burial depth, potentially resulting in major trenching cost savings. In order to gain confidence in this numerical modeling technique, a systematic validation effort was carried out, whereby numerical predictions of subgouge displacements were compared with measured data from centrifuge tests and other published empirical and numerical data. Sensitivity analyses were then performed to investigate the effect of the scouring keel geometry, depth, and attack angle on the induced subgouge soil displacements. Preliminary conclusions were drawn and presented in this paper.