Underground Wireless Communications for Monitoring of Drag Anchor Embedment Parameters: A Feasibility Study

In the offshore engineering community, reliable deep-water anchor performance is critical for mooring floating platforms such as Mobile Offshore Drilling Units. In a typical installation, an anchor is fully embedded into the seabed (up to 100 m). This has to be done with high fidelity as anchor failure can cause floating units to go adrift, damaging oil and gas pipelines. The likelihood of this happening may be reduced with a data acquisition system comprising various sensors/measurement instruments housed in the anchor, where their data is then transmitted in some ways towards the seabed, and then onwards to the installation vessel. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of electromagnetic wave underground wireless communications as a low cost means to transmit key anchor parameters from the anchor to the seabed. We employ two semi-empirical models to obtain the path loss characteristics at different operating frequencies and volumetric water contents.