Numerical Investigation of the Dynamics for Low Tension Marine Cables

This paper presents a numerical investigation into the dynamics of marine cables which are extensively used in offshore industry. In this numerical study, the Euler-Bernoulli beam model is adopted to develop the governing equations of the cable. Bending stiffness is considered to cope with the low tension problem in local area of towing cable, and thus a more accurate solution with the consideration of the axial elongation can be given.The derived strongly-coupled and nonlinear governing equations are solved by a second-order accurate, implicit,and large time step stable central finite difference method. The quadratically convergent Newton-Raphson iteration method is applied to solving the discrete nonlinear algebraic equations. Then a towed array sonar system(TASS)problem is studied. The numerical solutions agree reasonably well with the experimental data and the simulated results of the references. The specified program of the present paper shows great robustness with high efficiency.