Management of seabed and wind farm interaction

An increasing number of offshore wind farms have been installed over the last decades. The experience from these wind farms shows that the applied scour management is not always as efficient as planned. Scour is the local erosion around the foundation due to the changed flow around the foundation. This is traditionally controlled by placing a scour protection of rocks around the foundation. Recent research has indicated that it might be possible to design the scour protections to be more efficient and cheaper. In some cases it might in fact be possible to omit the scour protection without getting any severe scour around the foundation. Whether or not this is the case will depend on the local flow conditions.The aim of the project is to give guidelines for an improved scour management, by developing better tools for scour prediction and prediction of the general seabed development and by improving the knowledge of the mechanisms of the scour protections.The improved scour management can reduce the costs of foundation of offshore wind turbines significantly. The reduction is estimated to 0.5 to 1.0 million DKK per foundation or around 100 million DKK for a typical wind farm