Abstract
In the context of subsea lifting many equipment and strategies are employed in order to avoid dynamic instabilities and complex mechanical behaviors during the installation procedures. One of those strategies is the use of synthetic cables to reduce the total sustained weight on the crane and to shift the resonance frequency of the system, leading to reductions of fails risks. This work presents a numerical model intended to predict the dynamic behavior of a cable-equipment system under the influence of the sea waves. The cable is discretized in a finite element mesh which accounts for a nonlinear material model for the elasticity of the cable. The nonlinear elastic law uses a polynomial function to represent the force on the cable as a function of the strain, being able to predict the variation of the stiffness for different load conditions. Further, hydrodynamic forces are considered acting on the equipment and are modeled via Morison’s equation, which introduces a quadratic nonlinear forcing term. The equation of motion is then integrated at the time domain through a Newmark-β predictor-corrector method in order to obtain the dynamic response of the system. Furthermore, an Orcaflex model is constructed using an equivalent linear stiffness representation for the synthetic cable. The results obtained are compared, and the differences between them are highlighted for typical subsea lifting scenarios. In this case, the proposed model can predict non trivial dynamic behaviors of the system such as dependence on the amplitude of the displacement of the lifting point. It is also presented the scenarios where the equivalent linear model is accurate in comparison to the nonlinear one and how the selection of the strain point used to linearize the model affects the dynamics of the system.
