• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.324-332
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• 2018

It is known that damages to the subsea cables used for electric power transmission between islands and countries, including renewable energy from offshore wind power, current, tides, etc., cost much to restore, which causes social and economic losses. Various types of fishing rigs and anchors have been reported to be the greatest hazards to subsea cables. It is possible to design and construct a suitable protection facility for a subsea cable by precisely estimating the underwater behavior of such hazardous apparatuses. In this study, numerical simulations of the underwater behaviors of various hazardous apparatuses were carried out using fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analysis as a basic study to simulate the actual behavior phenomena of hazardous apparatuses in relation to a subsea cable. In addition, the underwater drop characteristics according to the types of hazardous apparatuses were compared. In order to verify the accuracy of the FSI analysis method used in this study, we compared the test results for underwater drops of a steel ball bearing. Stock anchors, stockless anchors, and rocket piles, which were actually reported to be the cases of damage to subsea cables along the southwest coast of Korea, were considered as the hazardous apparatuses for the numerical simulations. Each hazardous apparatus was generated by a Lagrangian model and coupled with the fluid domain idealized by the Eulerian equation to construct the three-dimensional FSI analysis model. The accuracy of the numerical simulation results was verified by comparing them with the analytical solutions, and the underwater drop characteristics according to the types of hazard apparatuses were compared.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.299-314
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• 2015

Submersed rock-berm structures are frequently used for protection of underwater lifelines such as pipelines and power cables. During the service life, the rock-berm structure can experience several accidental loads such as anchor collision. The consequences can be severe with a certain level of frequency; hence, the structural responses should be carefully understood for implementing a proper structural health monitoring method. However, no study has been made to quantify the structural responses because it is hard to deal with the individual behavior of each rock. Therefore, this study presents a collision analysis of the submersed rock-berm structure using a finite element software package by facilitating the smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method. The analysis results were compared with those obtained from the Lagrange method. Moreover, two types of anchors (stock anchor and stockless anchor), three collision points and two different drop velocities (terminal velocity of each anchor and 5 m/s) were selected to investigate the changes in the responses. Finally, the effect of these parameters (analysis method, anchor type, collision point and drop velocity) on the analysis results was studied. Accordingly, the effectiveness of the SPH method is verified, a safe rock-berm height (over 1 m) is proposed, and a gauge point (0.5 m above the seabed) is suggested for a structural health monitoring implementation.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.3-9
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• 2017

Due to difficulties of continuous electric power provision to underwater communication nodes, the efficient power usage is highly required in underwater network protocol. In this paper, we studied the energy efficient MAC(Medium Access Control) protocol for underwater network supporting mobile nodes such as UUV(Unmanned Underwater Vehicle) and AUV(Autonomous Underwater Vehicle). The mobile nodes could waste the electric power in vain when the receiver moves out of the radio propagation coverage during the data exchange and thus the transmitted data fails in reaching the receiver. Expecially, such a failure is much more obvious in underwater acoustic channels since the propagation delay is about $10^5$ times slower than in terrestrial radio channels. This proposed mobility-MAC controls the data dropping stochastically in the Dropping Zone by considering the receiver's location and moving velocity. In conclusion, this selective dropping method not only improves latency and throughput by reducing invalid droppings but also boosts power efficiency by valid droppings.

• Ocean Systems Engineering
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.377-400
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• 2016

Dropped objects are among the top ten causes of fatalities and serious injuries in the oil and gas industry (DORIS, 2016). Objects may accidentally fall down from platforms or vessels during lifting or any other offshore operation. Proper planning of lifting operations requires the knowledge of the risk-free zone on the sea bed to protect underwater structures and equipment. To this end a three-dimensional (3D) theory of dynamic motion of dropped cylindrical object is expanded to also consider ocean currents. The expanded theory is integrated into the authors' Dropped Objects Simulator (DROBS). DROBS is utilized to simulate the trajectories of dropped cylinders falling through uniform currents originating from different directions (incoming angle at $0^{\circ}$, $90^{\circ}$, $180^{\circ}$, and $270^{\circ}$). It is found that trajectories and landing points of dropped cylinders are greatly influenced by the direction of current. The initial conditions after the cylinders have fallen into the water are treated as random variables. It is assumed that the corresponding parameters orientation angle, translational velocity, and rotational velocity follow normal distributions. The paper presents results of DROBS simulations for the case of a dropped cylinder with initial drop angle at $60^{\circ}$ through air-water columns without current. Then the Monte Carlo simulations are used for predicting the landing point distributions of dropped cylinders with varying drop angles under current. The resulting landing point distribution plots may be used to identify risk free zones for offshore lifting operations.