New approaches to wear optimization for a laying pipe

This project report reviews several extensions to prior research involving the optimal design of a steel laying pipe. A team of graduate and undergraduate researchers explored three different aspects of the pipe-laying problem, each of which attempt to minimize or evenly distribute the wear the pipe experiences during operation. These three areas are (1) functional minimization to determine a boundary value problem which the minimal-wear pipe should solve, (2) gradient-descent algorithm to find the
minimal-wear pipe from a finite-dimensional search space, and (3) analysis of the force and torque balance equations to determine how internal moments in the pipe affect the wear the pipe suffers.