Abstract
The Subsea Shuttle Tanker (SST) is a cost-effective, novel sizeable autonomous vehicle designed to transport liquid CO2 between land facilities and smaller marginal fields. The SST travels underwater at a nominal diving depth of 70 m, allowing it to carry out freight operations in all weather conditions. Accurate structural assessment of large submarines is an essential part of structural reliability. In many practical cases, finite element methods (FEM) are used to predict the structural performance of the hull, but they come with significant computational expenses and time. This paper aims to present a reliable and efficient multi-body approach based on the discrete-module-beam bending-based hydroelectricity method to study the hydro-elastic behavior of SST hull at 40 and 70 m water depth. First, the continuous hull of the SST is discretized into several multi-body rigid modules. Then, a planar multi-body seakeeping model is presented to study the bending moment response of an interconnected multi-body rigid module under wave loads. The bending moment results are first measured using simplified multi-body geometry to ensure the use of the optimal number of model fidelity. The bending moment time series and power spectral density (PSD) have been analyzed in this paper. Numerical results also show that the mean bending moment at 40 m water depth is approximately 3 to 40 % greater than at 70 m water depth.
