Spatial Rigid-Flexible-Liquid Coupling Dynamics of Towed System Analyzed by a Hamiltonian Finite Element Method

An effective Hamiltonian finite element method is presented in this paper to investigate the three-dimensional dynamic responses of a towed cable-payload system with large deformation. The dynamics of a flexible towed system moving in a medium is a classical and complex rigid-flexible-liquid coupling problem. The dynamic governing equation is derived from the Hamiltonian system and built-in canonical form. A Symplectic algorithm is built to analyze the canonical equations numerically. Logarithmic strain is applied to estimate the large deformation effect and the system stiffness matrix will be updated for each calculation time step. A direct integral solution of the medium drag effect is derived in which the traditional coordinate transformation is avoided. A conical pendulum system and a 180° U-turn towed cable system are conducted and the results are compared with those retraced from the existing Hamiltonian method based on small deformation theory and the dynamic software of Livermore software technology corp. (LS-DYNA). Furthermore, a circularly towed system is analyzed and compared with experimental data. The comparisons show that the presented method is more accurate than the existing Hamiltonian method when large deformation occurred in the towed cable due to the application of logarithmic strain. Furthermore, it is more effective than LS-DYNA to treat the rigid-flexible-liquid coupling problems in the costs of CPU time.

Application for Improved Awareness of Cable Geometry During Seismic Survey Operation

Seismic surveys for petroleum exploration employ a number of towed cable streamers of lengths in the order of 3∼12 km. Accurate positioning is important both for navigation and control of the streamer spread and for seismic data processing. In the present study, a numerical streamer model based on a Finite Element Method is implemented both as an Extended Kalman filter and an Ensemble Kalman filter. The streamer model includes features such as tailbuoy, locally estimated sea current introduced at each node, control bird inputs, cable stretch and tension. The filter implementations are intended to blend the streamer model with observations such as acoustic range measurements and satellite navigation positioning. The implementations have been compared and validated employing full scale data for two line changes. The purpose is to investigate the filters’ performance during periods with poor or missing observations.

The Wire Flyer Towed Profiling System

The Wire Flyer towed vehicle is a new platform able to collect high-resolution water column sections. The vehicle is motivated by a desire to effectively capture spatial structures at the submesoscale. The vehicle fills a niche that is not achieved by other existing towed and repeat profiling systems. The Wire Flyer profiles up and down along a ship-towed cable autonomously using controllable wings for propulsion. At ship speeds between 2 and 5 kt (1.02–2.55 m s−1), the vehicle is able to profile over prescribed depth bands down to 1000 m. The vehicle carries sensors for conductivity, temperature, depth, oxygen, turbidity, chlorophyll, pH, and oxidation reduction potential. During normal operations the vehicle is typically commanded to cover vertical regions between 300 and 400 m in height with profiles that repeat at kilometer spacing. The vertical profiling speed can be user specified up to 150 m min−1. The high-density sampling capability at depths below the upper few hundred meters makes the vehicle distinct from other systems. During operations an acoustic modem is used to communicate with the vehicle to provide status information, data samples, and the ability to modify the sampling pattern. This paper provides an overview of the vehicle system, describes its operation, and presents results from several cruises.

Motion Simulation Analysis of the Cable-Body of the Deep Underwater Towed System

As the demand of marine resources is continuously growing, more and more people are focusing on the study of underwater towed system for marine survey, in which mastering and predicting the dynamic characteristic of the system is the key problem. Based on the parameters of a certain underwater system, combined with the lumped mass method, the underwater cable-body 3D motion mathematical model has been established by OrcaFlex, in which the variation of the tension of the towed cable and the variation of the depth of the towed body have been given and the effect of the towed speed on critical radius in the process of the 360° rotary motion has been discussed. The results show a good agreement with previous research results. At the same time, we also make a research on the effects of the change of the hydrodynamic coefficients and the parameters of towed cable on variation of the tension and towed depth. These studies can provide a basis for the selection of cable in the system.