Abstract
The offshore wind is the sector of marine renewable energy with the highest commercial development at present. The margin to optimise offshore wind foundations is considerable, thus attracting both the scientific and the industrial community. Due to the complexity of the marine environment, the foundation of an offshore wind turbine represents a considerable portion of the overall investment. An important part of the foundation’s costs relates to the scour protections, which prevent scour effects that can lead the structure to reach the ultimate and service limit states. Presently, the advances in scour protections design and its optimisation for marine environments face many challenges, and the latest findings are often bounded by stakeholder’s strict confidential policies. Therefore, this paper provides a broad overview of the latest improvements acquired on this topic, which would otherwise be difficult to obtain by the scientific and general professional community. In addition, this paper summarises the key challenges and recent advances related to offshore wind turbine scour protections. Knowledge gaps, recent findings and prospective research goals are critically analysed, including the study of potential synergies with other marine renewable energy technologies, as wave and tidal energy. This research shows that scour protections are a field of study quite challenging and still with numerous questions to be answered. Thus, optimisation of scour protections in the marine environment represents a meaningful opportunity to further increase the competitiveness of marine renewable energies.
Highlights
Scour Protection Conceptual DesignsScour protections have an important role in offshore wind turbine design. Rip-rap (rubble mound material) protections are a common type of protection, due to their low cost and material availability [3]
Introduction published maps and institutional affilOffshore wind energy (OWE) is one of the largest forms of clean energy and a sector in clear expansion over the last decades [1,2,3,4]
While the concept of statically stable scour protections is at a mature state of the application in several commercial projects of offshore wind energy, the design concepts of dynamic stability and wide-graded protections are yet to reach the same level of application, at least from what it can be judged from the reported field cases
Summary
Scour protections have an important role in offshore wind turbine design. Rip-rap (rubble mound material) protections are a common type of protection, due to their low cost and material availability [3]. It is important to mention that often novel and optimised concepts, which may have been successfully implemented in the field, are not extensively announced to the scientific and professional community. 1.0 m (sometimes higher) in the traditional static scour protection Such differences in the thickness depend on the optimisation of the median stone size (D50 ), since its reduction, which can go up to 80% according to Reference [23], may require an increase of the thickness to sustain the acceptable damage level without failure occurrence. It is important to account for operation and maintenance costs that may arise from the need to refilling the dynamic protection after severe storms These costs are reduced if a static solution with very large stone sizes is applied. The actual optimisation needs to be assessed on a case-to-case basis and always accounting for the CAPEX and OPEX parcels throughout the lifecycle of the foundation ( see Section 2.3)
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