Submarine Landslides and their impacts on Offshore Infrastructures

Due to significant expansion of offshore structures in Europe, estimating potential submarine slides is important for the safe design of offshore structures so that they can withstand the impact of landslides.

However, state-of-the-art submarine landslide modelling (a) fails to understand the triggering mechanism involving pore pressure development; (b) are unable to account for complex sediment properties; and (c) cannot quantify accurately impact forces of submarine slides on offshore structures.

This poses a grand challenge: to simulate the entire process of submarine slides considering the complex interaction among saturated sediment, seawater, and offshore structures.

To address this challenge, SUBSLIDE aims to develop a novel soil-fluid-structure interaction model capable of handling critical-state soil mechanics (saturated sediments), fluid mechanics (seawater), and solid mechanics (structures) in a unified manner.

I will implement the formulation using the Material Point Method, an advanced numerical method for modelling extremely large deformation of materials in the high-performance Uintah computing framework.

The expected outcome is a novel tool for simulating the full process of submarine slides to understand their full mechanisms and estimating impact forces on offshore structures.

SUBSLIDE combines my expertise in computational mechanics, the expertise of the host institution in constitutive soil modelling, and the expertise of the secondment host in the measurement and analysis of landslides. The results will constitute a scientific breakthrough in submarine landslide modelling.

Also, SUBSLIDE will assist the Norwegian Public Road Administration in predicting the potential submarine landslides through dissemination and exploitation activities.

The fellowship will accelerate my academia career, establish my research independence and facilitate new collaborations for building a research group renowned for state-of-the-art computational geomechanics.