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Subsea pipelines play a vital role in oil and gas transportation. However, ocean current-induced scour inevitably leads to the formation of long free spans, which results in large deformation and potential structural damage. Although many methods have been proposed for pipeline deformation monitoring, these methods have limitations in terms of accuracy and availability for subsea pipelines with large deformation. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the analogy stiffness upgrading (ASU) method, which is a novel framework that integrates the inverse finite element method (iFEM) with corotational theory to enable accurate reconstruction of large deformations. The core innovation of the ASU method lies in the introduction of an analogy stiffness matrix and an analogy force vector, which serve as the key bridging elements between iFEM and the co-rotational formulation. These quantities are constructed from the strain–displacement matrix and measured strains, and then embedded into an iterative global equilibrium process based on local-to-global coordinate transformations. This formulation effectively eliminates rigid body motion and captures geometric nonlinearities. The performance of this method is comprehensively verified through extensive numerical simulations under various deformation scenarios. The results demonstrate that the ASU method can accurately reconstruct large deformations in submarine pipelines, thus highlighting its potential for practical applications. • Proposed a novel shape sensing method for large deformation monitoring of subsea pipelines. • Accurate deformation predictions can be achieved with fewer sensors, demonstrating its practical application potential. • The deformed shapes can be predicted only using final measured strains, simplifying the monitoring process.
Jiang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.