SIMULATION OF TORPEDO ANCHOR INSTALLATION USING THE MATERIAL POINT METHOD

Resumo

Exploration of deep-sea reservoirs is an important industrial activity due to the amount of oil
and gas the modern society demands. Thus, one needs to find a safe way to moor ships and platforms and

ensure continued and uninterrupted distribution of oil and gas. Torpedo anchors are often used as foun-
dation for offshore facilities as they are cost effective and their usage is independent of water depth. As

it is not easy to predict the behavior of installing such structures, usage of a numerical tool is necessary
and this theme has been the focus of many studies, aided by numerical methods such as Computational
Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Discrete Element Method (DEM) and Material Point Method (MPM). The last

of these, the MPM uses an interesting strategy that benefits from both Lagrangian and Eulerian formula-
tions. For instance, the convective term in momentum conservation is eliminated as a consequence of the

Lagrangian formulation and mesh distortion is avoided by a fixed background grid. On the MPM, ma-
terial information is placed inside material points, which are used to interpolate data to the background

grid, where the equations of motion are solved. Since the grid is fixed, large strains and displacements are
not a problem. Many authors used an axisymmetric formulation to simulate the installation of torpedo
anchors with the MPM. In real-life situations, however, the soil might display asymmetries. Therefore,
this work adopts the usual non-symmetric formulation to simulate the installation of two different anchor
designs on a non-symmetric soil using the MPM.