Spotlight on Research Fellow Joe Tom

September 18, 2018

 

Joe Tom is a Research Fellow in the Project 4:  Novel Anchors and Subsea Foundation Systems project stream.  Joe’s research is focusing on mooring line trenching and its impact on anchor capacity. A multi-disciplinary approach is vital in defining this concept, and Joe is drawing on the expertise from across the OFFshore Industrial Transformation Research Hub for Offshore Floating Facilities (ITRH) to do so.

“I’ve broken the problem into fundamental components and performed both physical experiments and computational analyses. Computational fluid dynamics are used to predict how water flows around the oscillating mooring and this is validated by supporting experiments.  Concepts from sediment transport are then applied to assess the rate and extent of seabed trenching.”

In conjunction with Joe’s work, industry partners are providing field data of instances where mooring line trenching has and hasn’t occurred.  This data will help to validate Joe’s new analysis methods and enable him to create new prediction methods.

This, in turn,  will allow for more accurate forecasting of mooring line trenching and will directly impact the development and design of more robust mooring systems, providing less down time and greater production.

Incremental publication of Joe’s research is listed here, and further details are available on Joe’s profile page.

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