Submarine pipelines located near harbour areas and in major shipping lanes are likely to be exposed to potential damage due to anchors and dropped object impact. To protect these pipelines, they are buried and protected with rock armour berms. The design of these rock berms has been traditionally based on model test results. In this paper, a simplified method is proposed to simulate the interaction between the anchor, seabed soil and rock armour, on the basis of the thrust earth pressure theory. The results agree well with the centrifuge test results.

The non-linear finite element program Ls-DYNA/ANSYS is applied to simulate numerically the capacity for the geo-materials to dissipate the energy induced by the falling objects. The calculation results for the crushed stone coincide well with those recommended by the current Code of《DNV-rp-f107_2010》, which is on the basis of experiment data, implying the feasibility of using this program to estimate the energy dissipating capacity of the geo-materials. Because little research has been performed with clay soil, the program Ls-DYNA/ANSYS is used to predict the energy dissipating capacity of clay layers.