A comprehensive review on scour and scour protections for complex bottom-fixed offshore and marine renewable energy foundations

Abstract

Due to the marine environment's complexity, optimising offshore foundations' design is still a major focus of the scientific and industrial community, since foundations represent a large portion of the total investment. Scour is one of the main causes that lead to ultimate, and service limit states, impacting design optimization and costs. Scour at monopile foundations has been extensively studied. However, advances in scour protections for hybrid structures, and other bottom-fixed foundations for offshore renewable energy harvesting technologies are often kept confidential by stakeholders, and knowledge gaps must be covered. Thus, the present paper provides a summary of the most recent physical and numerical studies related to scour and riprap scour protections for complex bottom-fixed foundations, such as jackets, tripods, gravity-based foundations (GBF), high-rise structure foundations (HRSF), and suction buckets, while covering other marine energy harvesting technologies as well, including wave energy converters (WEC) and tidal energy converters (TEC). This manuscript presents knowledge gaps, recent improvements, and potential studies on hybrid foundations – offshore wind turbine foundations combined with WECs or TECs. It is shown that offshore scour protection is a study field with a wide margin of development, but crucial for the future of the offshore renewable energy sector, thus pointing out key challenges and major opportunities for future research.