Centre for Offshore Foundation Systems

Geohazards

 

A critical challenge as Australian developments move into water depths in excess of one kilometre is assessing and mitigating geohazards and safely routing long-distance pipelines that tie new fields to onshore processing facilities.

The Centre is supported by the Western Australian Government as a designated State Centre of Excellence for the period 2005-10. This status is allowing us to expand our capabilities in the area of deep-water geohazards.

We have provided support to several developments in deep water offshore Australia that are in different stages of planning, and we have strong links with other groups worldwide that are conducting complementary research in this area.

Submarine slides represent a major geohazard and are relevant to major developments currently planned offshore WA and elsewhere.

We are researching the impact forces and structural response during slide-pipeline interaction, on various fronts, including constitutive modelling of the soil-fluid transition as a submarine slide flows, analytical modelling of the pipe-slide-seabed interaction forces, and numerical modelling of the overall structural response of the pipeline.