Numerical and Experimental Modeling of Scour at Foundation Structures for Offshore Wind Turbines

There is presently a lack of knowledge of scour progression for complex offshore foundation structures, such as Tripod foundations for offshore wind turbines. Typically, scour is investigated in physical model tests. As an extension, parts of the investigations could be carried out by using numerical methods; however, such numerical methods require that all relevant processes leading to scour are captured well by the model. The general possibility for conducting such numerical simulations is presented here, given by the examples of flow, shear stress, and scour calculations for a Tripod foundation and a circular cylinder. The numerical investigations were carried out within the framework of OpenFOAM software code, which was extended by an appropriate scour model.