The art of cable arranging
How to design a collection of cables to be both robust and flexible?
A subsea control umbilical is a collection of electrical, fibre optic cables, and fluid conduits bound together. In offshore oil and gas field developments, umbilicals are critical so they need to be robust and flexible.
There is not limit to the number of possible designs that the cables can occupy, so it is not possible to just check them all. Instead, we need to allow, mathematically, these cables to be placed any where as long as they do not overlap or break any other given restriction. Naturally this leads us to formulate the problem as an optimisation problem with continuous variables.
The light green cables are heavy steel cables, darker green are quad cables and the small purple one are fibre optical.
On the left we see a design which penalised steel cables touching (as it leads to greater wear and tear).
Artur L Gower
Lecturer in Dynamics
Art Gower is a lecturer at the University of Sheffield and part of the Dynamics group. He uses maths to understand waves (sound and light) in materials. Sometimes computers show him that his maths is wrong.