Scour Development around Large-Diameter Monopiles in Cohesive Soils: Evidence from the Field
Publication: Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal, and Ocean Engineering
Volume 143, Issue 5
Abstract
Despite the progress in scour research over the last three decades, seabed scour development in cohesive and nonuniform soils is still an area of great uncertainty and remains a challenge for designing structurally efficient and effective foundations in the offshore marine environment. The uncertainty is made greater by the timescale required for scouring and effects, such as sediment abrasion, pile installation impacts, and operationally and environmentally induced dynamic motions. The rapid growth in offshore wind, particularly in European waters, has led to a requirement for estimates for scour development in such soils. This becomes very pertinent for large-volume serial installation of foundations, such as those required for offshore wind farm developments, given that there is a limit to the amount of detailed geotechnical information that can be collected as part of a project, and soil erosion testing is not standard. There is a reliance in geotechnical data, such as undrained shear strength, derived from cone penetration tests, supplemented with borehole data collected at a limited number of locations across the wind farm site combined with laboratory analysis of soil samples. This paper reviews the present evidence from both field and laboratory measurements of scour potential and looks at possible approaches for determining scour magnitude in cohesive soils including hydraulic and mechanical effects.
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Acknowledgments
This research was funded by HR Wallingford’s scour research program and was partly undertaken while the lead author was a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering within the Faculty of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics at the University of Western Australia. The first author would also like to thank Professor David White for useful discussions while at the University of Western Australia.
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Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal, and Ocean Engineering
Volume 143 • Issue 5 • September 2017
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© 2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Sep 12, 2016
Accepted: Mar 3, 2017
Published online: May 25, 2017
Published in print: Sep 1, 2017
Discussion open until: Oct 25, 2017
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