Modern approaches to research and development of underwater floating constructions

Abstract

New transport facilities such as floating underwater tunnels present a major scientific challenge. No such structure has been built all over the world; design, at best, ends at the technical and economic assessment stage. The scientific basis development for designing these structures began in the 1990s, mainly in Norway, Japan, Italy, and South Korea. A submerged floating tunnel is a structure, also known as the «Archimedes Bridge», in terms of design is an underwater artificial structure attached to pontoons on the surface of the water (zero buoyancy structure) or secured from emersion by anchor devices (positive buoyancy structure). The lack of any construction experience makes the synthesis problem of optimal solutions very relevant. There are many approaches to the underwater floating tunnel calculation and a certain paradigm for their study has not been established. For Russia, the use of floating tunnels is relevant in connection with the construction of the northern latitudinal passage and the crossing of large Siberian rivers near the coast of the Arctic Ocean. Significant deep-water obstacles are the Caspian Sea, Baikal, reservoirs of Siberian rivers, and sea straits. The review article discusses the foreign experience of scientific design basics development of such tunnels and provides a structure classification based on draft designs. Foreign publications devoted to various research and development aspects of underwater floating tunnels are considered. The problems solved in current works devoted to the study of floating tunnels can be conditionally divided into three groups. The first group of tasks concerns the justification of the use of the structure in the organization of intersections, the second group of tasks concerns the floating tunnels design calculation for various effects and their combinations, and the third group of tasks combines two related areas: the search for new methods for calculating and optimizing structures.