An Instrumentation and Control System for SubSea Cable Burial

To protect new and existing subsea electric utility power cables from environmental and man-made hazards, they must be buried under the sea floor. Experience demonstrates that the cable must be handled extremely carefully throughout the lay and burial sequence. During 1980, an automated, simultaneous cable-lay, trenching, and burial-sled system was implemented and tested. Following a period of modification and improvement, full-scale operations began under the adverse conditions of Cook Inlet, Alaska. This paper describes the automated control and instrumentation system which is being used to integrate surface-cable handling and subsea-trenching and burial operations. Key system elements include a subsea control and sensor suite directed by a surface microcomputer via bidirectional serially multiplexed communications.