Honours Project: Multi Pass and Deep Ploughing Strategies

Hello!

I'm now well into my first semester of fourth year and now my dissertation/project is starting to get interesting.

I'm going to be looking into multi pass trenching, which, in a nutshell, is ploughing soil from the seabed in order to lay a pipeline underneath the surface. There are dangers associated having pipelines sitting on, or above the seabed, such as external loading from fishing and trawling nets and hydrodynamic loading. There is also the risk of movement of the pipeline, by thermal expansion on commissioning. In areas such as polar regions, trenches must be deeper than normal, which isn't possible when ploughing in one pass. Multi pass, is where the trench is ploughed more than once in order to make a deeper trench.


The purpose of my study is to create an original model to investigate the effect of multi pass pipeline ploughing by using experimental results from 1/50th laboratory model testing, as well as creating a tow force prediction model that incorporates multi pass ploughing.
Next wait, I'm starting the experiment phase of the project, can't wait to get into the lab for my first proper original investigation!!

Will post pictures and more from the lab next week!!