2024 Volume 80 Issue 17 Article ID: 24-17204
Bottom-mounted offshore wind power generation unit has a tower to support windmill. The tower on the sea bottom has risk of local scouring around the base of the tower by wave and currents, and scour protection works are installed around the tower as the countermeasure against the instability of the tower due to local scouring.
This paper describes a study on the stability of scour protection works around the tower based on the results of wave tank experiment and numerical simulation.
In the wave tank experiments, the damage level of scour protection works is investigated under several different conditions of wave height, wave period and current velocity. It is found as the experimental results that the wave condition with low depth-wavelength ratio have a higher possibility of the damage level of scour protection works.
Three-dimensional numerical simulations have been conducted by using OpenFOAM, and the distributions of flow velocity and wall shear stress are obtained under the simplified wave and current conditions. Through comparisons between experimental and numerical results, it is indicated that the damaged area of scour protection works in the experiments have an association with the distributions of flow velocity and wall shear stress derived by numerical simulations.
