Study for mitigating scour around the monopile foundations of offshore wind turbines

Scour occurring around the monopile foundations of offshore wind turbines has been widely reported in recent years. It threatens the safety and reliability of those offshore wind turbines supported by monopile foundations. Currently, tons of rock/stone are poured down around the foundations as a measure for mitigating scour. However, such a method is costly and inconvenient to implement at offshore site. Moreover, the rock and stone will spread on the seabed over time. It will be very difficult to recycle them in the future. Therefore, it has become a pressing task to address this issue particularly in the light of fact that the offshore wind industry is booming across the world today and more and more wind turbines will be installed offshore and supported by monopile foundations. Motivated by this urgent requirement, the feasibility study of a new scour reduction technique, namely fishnet, is conducted in this paper by the approach of numerical analysis. From the numerical research, it is found that in contrast to existing scour mitigation method, fishnet is not only effective in reducing scour around the wind turbine monopile foundations, but is also more cost-effective and easier to deploy at site.