IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v11y2018i10p2593-d172672.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Concept Research of a Countermeasure Device for Preventing Scour around the Monopile Foundations of Offshore Wind Turbines

Author

Listed:
  • Wenxian Yang

    (School of Engineering, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK)

  • Wenye Tian

    (School of Engineering, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK)

Abstract

Scouring has long been considered to be a major issue affecting the reliability of the monopile foundations of offshore wind turbines (OWTs) on sandy seabeds. To reduce the impact of scouring, several tons of rock/stone are usually placed around the foundations shortly after the installation of them. Such a measure is costly. Moreover, rock and stone may spread widely on the seabed during the long-term service period of OWTs. It has no doubt that recycling these rock and stone on the seabed is quite difficult in future decommission. For this reason, a new scour-countermeasure device (SEMCD) is proposed and studied in this paper. Considering that the major driver of scouring is horseshoe vortices around the monopile foundation, a hollow horn-like SEMCD with an arc surface profile is designed for weakening the horseshoe vortices. The SEMCD is made of either cement or other kinds of corrosion resistant materials. It is light in weight, and easy to install and decommission. In the paper, the working mechanism of the SEMCD is first explained. Then, its scouring mitigation effect (SME), i.e., its contribution to the reduction of horseshoe vortices and the mitigation of seabed erosion around the foundation, is studied through investigating its influences on down/up-flow and seabed shear stress. Finally, the optimal size of the SEMCD is discussed through investigating the impact of its size on the speeds of up and down flows and the shear stress on seabed surface. The calculation results have shown that the proposed SEMCD has great potential to prevent scouring and seabed erosion, so that it is of significance to improve the reliability of the monopile foundations of OWTs.

Suggested Citation

  • Wenxian Yang & Wenye Tian, 2018. "Concept Research of a Countermeasure Device for Preventing Scour around the Monopile Foundations of Offshore Wind Turbines," Energies, MDPI, vol. 11(10), pages 1-16, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:gam:jeners:v:11:y:2018:i:10:p:2593-:d:172672
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/10/2593/pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/10/2593/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jeners:v:11:y:2018:i:10:p:2593-:d:172672. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.