Influence of Bending Stiffness on Snap Loads in Marine Cables: A Study Using a High-Order Discontinuous Galerkin Method

• Main Authors: Johannes Palm, Claes Eskilsson
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-10-01
• Series: Journal of Marine Science and Engineering
• Subjects: cable dynamics; bending stiffness; discontinuous Galerkin method; snap loads; low-tension cables; ROV tethers
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/8/10/795

Marine cables are primarily designed to support axial loads. The effect of bending stiffness on the cable response is therefore often neglected in numerical analysis. However, in low-tension applications such as umbilical modelling of ROVs or during slack events, the bending forces may affect the slack regime dynamics of the cable. In this paper, we present the implementation of bending stiffness as a rotation-free, nested local Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method into an existing Lax–Friedrichs-type solver for cable dynamics based on an <inline-formula><math display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mi>h</mi><mi>p</mi></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>-adaptive DG method. Numerical verification shows exponential convergence of order <i>P</i> and <inline-formula><math display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mi>P</mi><mo>+</mo><mn>1</mn></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula> for odd and even polynomial orders, respectively. Validation of a swinging cable shows good comparison with experimental data, and the importance of bending stiffness is demonstrated. Snap load events in a deep water tether are compared with field-test data. The bending forces affect the low-tension response for shorter lengths of tether (200–500 m), which results in an increasing snap load magnitude for increasing bending stiffness. It is shown that the nested LDG method works well for computing bending effects in marine cables.