A FEM model of deep sea mining coupling system is built with MSC.MARC software, which consists of seabed, mining machine and flexible hose. Three-dimensional hexahedron elements are adopted to calculate dynamic response under mining machine movement in line path. The Drucker-Prager elastic-plastic model is introduced to the soil material. A short 10-s simulation of the interactions between the dynamics of the mining machine on seabed and the flexible hose is carried out. The calculation results show that the soil material model in this paper can reflect the non-linear deformation characteristics of soil well and truly and the bearing capacity and effective traction force can be provided by the seabed in this paper.
The deep sea mining system are composed of mining ship, rigid pipe, buffer, flexible hose and mining machine, which subjected to gravities of themselves, buoyancy in seawater, buoyancy of the buoy, resistance force of current action of wave and inner fluid as well as coupling effect of the components. Current research on the deep-ocean mining system is mainly focused on static and dynamic analyses of the rigid pipe(Chung, 1978; Chung and Felippa, 1981; Chung and Whitney, 1981, 1993) or flexible hose(Jian, 2001; Wang and Rao, 2009; Cui, 1999; Guo, 2000) independently. The overall operating performance of the mining system can not accurately be considered by a single study of each component. The concept of the integrated motion of the whole mining system was first proposed by Chung. Unfortunately, only a very few literatures (Brink and Chung, 1981; Cheng and Chung, 1995; Wang, 2005; Rao and Wang, 2009) are concerned with the integrated motion of the whole mining system, in which the dynamic characteristics of each part are investigated under different operation modes, but the role of the seabed was not taken into account.
