A Review of Soil–Tool Interactions in Submarine Trenching Operations

The increasing global demand for marine energy resources, coupled with the deployment of offshore oil and gas pipelines and submarine power cables, highlights the requirement for reliable subsea infrastructure. To protect these assets from environmental hazards and anthropogenic disturbances, seabed burial via trenching is widely adopted, with submarine trenchers serving as the main installation equipment. Trenching involves excavating a trench on the seabed to place pipelines, cables, or other subsea infrastructure. These operations involve complex soil–tool interactions that fundamentally govern cutting resistance, trench-wall stability, and overall equipment performance. Specifically, distinct engineering challenges arise across different trencher configurations: plough trenchers often encounter complex seabed structures, jet-type trenchers are prone to trench sidewall collapse, and mechanical trenchers face cutting difficulties in hard clay. A thorough understanding of these interactions is therefore critical for resolving operational challenges and optimizing trencher efficiency in engineering practice. To deeply understand these type-specific issues, this review summarizes the geomechanical problems associated with various trenching technologies, synthesizes recent research advances from analytical frameworks, physical experiments, and numerical simulations, and identifies existing knowledge gaps. By consolidating these findings, the paper provides a reference for addressing trencher-related engineering challenges, supporting equipment optimization, and facilitating the deployment of offshore energy transmission networks.