A review of scour impacting monopiles for offshore wind
Lili Qu, Hongwei An, Scott Draper, P. Watson, Ming Zhao, John Harris, R.J.S. Whitehouse, Di Zhang
Abstract
Monopiles are important structures in offshore wind engineering, primarily serving as foundations for wind turbines. When installed on a sandy seabed, local scour around monopiles can reduce their capacity, and is a significant hazard to be addressed in the design process. This paper provides a review of research related to local scour around monopiles, focusing on the following aspects: (1) identifying flow structures related to local scour, (2) synthesizing existing data on equilibrium scour depth and scour time-scale, (3) summarizing technology for observing local scour through laboratory experiments, numerical simulations and field observations, and (4) outlining the existing challenges and research opportunities.