Parametric Study on Scouring Around Suction Bucket Foundation

In the case of fixed offshore wind turbines, scouring phenomena have been reported around sub-structures as a result of currents, which seriously damage the structural stability. A parametric study of the various sub-structures of a fixed offshore wind turbine was performed to investigate their effects on the scouring phenomena. For a suction bucket foundation and monopile, the effects of the stick-up heights and water depth were studied, respectively. The open source libraries, called OpenFOAM, were used to simulate a violent flow around a foundation. The numerical methods were selected based on a two-dimensional analysis of a suction bucket. Based on the results for various stick-up heights, a larger scouring region was observed with an increase in the stick-up height because of the down-wash flow around a foundation. Based on the results for various monopile water depths, the water depth had an insignificant effect on the scouring. Received 4 July 2017, revised 4 July 2017, accepted 25 August 2017 Corresponding author Taehwan Joung: +82-(0)42-866-3964, thjoung@kriso.re.kr c 2017, The Korean Society of Ocean Engineers This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution non-commercial license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.