• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.53 no.5
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• pp.388-399
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• 2016

A motion analysis of an underwater towed cable is a complex task due to its nonlinear nature of the problem. The major source of the nonlinearity of the underwater cable analysis is that the motion of the cable involves large rigid-body motion. This large rigid-body motion makes difficult to use standard displacement-based finite element method. In this paper, the authors apply recently developed nodal position-based finite element method which can deal with the geometric nonlinearity due to the large rigid-body motion. In order to enhance the stability of the large-scale nonlinear cable motion simulation, an efficient time-integration scheme is proposed, namely predictor/multi-corrector Newmark scheme. Three different predictors are introduced, and the best predictor in terms of stability and robustness for impulsive cable motion analysis is proposed. As a result, the nonlinear motion of underwater cable is predicted in a very efficient manner compared to the classical finite element of finite difference methods. The efficacy of the method is demonstrated with several test cases, involving static and dynamic motion of a single cable element, and also under water towed cable composed of multiple cable elements.