Mr Senthilkumar Muthukrishnan

Offshore pipelines are increasingly being required to operate at high temperature and pressure as more petroleum deposits are explored further away from the shore. These extra long pipelines are usually placed in deep water sea and normally used trenching to bury them become impractical, and, therefore there are placed directly on the seabed embedded partially only by the self weight. As the length of pipeline increases along with the operating temperature, the likelihood for pipeline to expand during heating cycles increase considerably. Therefore, during heating and cooling cycles, pipeline can experience continued expansion or pipeline walking amounting to metres of expansion. The problem related to expansion of pipes laid on seabed are

Axial walking

Lateral Buckling

Among these, the analysis of lateral buckling phenomenon has been relatively well advanced and a pre defined controlled buckling approach is currently in practice to overcome lateral sweeping and related issues. In contrast, the axial walking behaviour has been overlooked since the platforms are located near the shore and the expansion over the length was relatively small as no significant damage has occurred in the past. The increasing demand for petroleum resources requires access to hostile offshore resources, and therefore, the need for detailed understanding of axial soil- pipe interaction has become an urgent necessity so that effective deepwater long pipelines could be developed. This research is focused to better understand the pipeline and clay seabed soil interaction phenomenon in the axial direction to evaluate the current field controlling measures and pipeline design.