Subsea Pipeline Bottom Roughness by ABAQUS/Standard

[subsealinepipe]

To carry out bottom roughness analysis (subsea pipeline on seabed), I use ANSYS, and for this purpose I use a pipe element (e.g. Pipe20) along with a gap contact element (e.g. contac52) based on the bathymetric data (geophysical survey) and writing a program file (macro) and defining various gap (loop command) along the route. However, I do not know how to do it in ABAQUS/Standard, since making loop in ABAQUS needs Python programming and I am not familiar with it at this stage. Of course for the other analysis which is based on smooth seabed assumption (e.g. crossing, lateral buckling) in ABAQUS/Standard I use gap contact (element base) command with pipe element (Pipe31) along with other commands to model pipeline on the seabed, in this case the gap in a limited locations can be different but not for many locations (which may need loop command). However my problem is modeling the pipeline on the seabed when the bathymetric data should be used and there is many various gap along the pipeline.
2nd question: in general my concept for the above finite element modeling is based on node to node contact. Can somebody kindly advise a better method to model pipeline on the seabed along with its method in details.

Regards,
Amir

 

[APipeliner]

1st Q: depend on your seabed undulations, you can model seabed as a rigid surface and use node-to-surface contact model. in this case you don't need to define any gap element explicitly.

2nd Q: In Abaqus, you can define both node-to-surface and surface-to-surface contact as well.