Abstract
As humans explore greater depths of the earth’s oceans, there is a growing need for the installation of subsea structures. Deployable structures can provide a lightweight, compact solution to form large-span structures underwater. Upon inflation, these structures, attached by sensors, can morph into final shapes that are a hundred times larger than their original volume, which extends the former detection range and also provides long-term observation capabilities. This research takes the inflatable structure fundamental element, the inflated tube, and studies its behavior under bending load conditions. Initial scale models are built for the study of the mechanics of inflatable tubes. Numerical and experimental approaches are both developed to investigate the inflatable tubular behavior under concerted loading conditions. The numerical model is based on finite element theory and considers fluid-structure interaction effects under different conditions. The numerical results were compared with the experimental data, where the fractional error between those was found to be less than 15 %. This shows that the methods used in this research lay the foundation for underwater inflatable structure design and analysis.
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