Freak waves are an extreme marine environment factor in offshore structure design and become a potential risk, particularly for laying oil-gas pipelines in deep waters. The objective of this study was to reveal the freak wave effects on dynamic behaviors of offshore pipelines for deepwater installation. Thus, a dedicated finite element model (FEM) for deepwater pipeline installation by the S-lay method was developed with special consideration of freak waves. The FEM also took pipelay vessel motions, pipe–stinger roller interactions, and the cyclic contacts between the pipeline and seabed soil into account. Real vessel and stinger data from an actual engineering project in the South China Sea were collected to obtain an accurate simulation. Moreover, an effective superposition approach of combined transient wave trains and random wave trains was introduced, and various types of freak wave trains were simulated. Extensive numerical analyses of a 12 inch gas pipeline being installed into a water depth of 1500 m were implemented under various freak wave conditions. The noticeable influences of freak waves on the pipeline and seabed responses were identified, which provides significant awareness of offshore pipelines for deepwater installation design and field operation monitoring.
The fragmentation of a shell filled with explosive is quite valuable for evaluating the killing ability of improvised explosive device. A typical explosive device with Q235 steel shell and TNT explosive is chosen to study the fragmentation of thin-walled structure. With sand recovery method, experiments are conducted to get fragments with the mass above 0.1g. G-S formula shows a better agreement with experimental results when predicting average fragment mass than Mott formula. Further researches show that shell thickness and length-diameter aspect ratio have great effect on the fragmentation of shell. Average fragment mass increases exponentially and total fragment number decreases exponentially when shell thickness increases, while average fragment mass remains almost unchanged and fragment number grows linearly when length-diameter aspect ratio increases. These results are very helpful for whenever academic study or real application.
As the main structural component of partition wall or load-bearing wall, brick masonry has been widely used in construction engineering. However, brick and mortar are all brittle materials prone to crack. Nowadays, fireworks, gas stoves, high-pressure vessels, and other military explosives may explode to damage nearby structures. Many explosion casualties had shown that the load-bearing capacity of brick masonry decreased dramatically and cracks or fragments appeared. Previous studies mainly focused on noncontact explosion in which shock wave is the main damage element. In fact, the response and damage effect of brick masonry wall under contact explosion are more complex, which attracts more attention now. In order to explore the damage characteristics of brick masonry under explosion load, a series of simulations and verification experiments are conducted. RHT and MO granular material models are introduced to describe the behaviour of brick and masonry, respectively, in simulation. The combination effect of front compressive wave and back tensile wave are main factors influencing the breakage of masonry wall. The experimental results are well in accordance with the simulation results. The front cross section dimension of crater is closely related to the radius of spherical explosive charge. A power function predictive model is developed to express the relationship between the radius of hole and the radius of explosive. Furthermore, with increasing the quantity of explosive charge, the number and ejection velocity of fragments are all increased. The relationship between maximum ejection velocity and the quantity of explosive also can be expressed as a power function model.
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