IHCantabria Testing East Anglia ONE Scour Protection Options

The Environmental Hydraulics Institute of Cantabria (IHCantabria) is carrying out an experiment campaign to evaluate the performance of different scour protection solutions on jacket foundations at the 714MW East Anglia ONE offshore wind farm.

In these physical tests, conducted in collaboration with Iberdrola and ScottishPower, the metocean characteristics of the studied location are simulated with the orientation of the jackets and seabed features reproduced at a scale of 1:30.

According to IHCantabria, the experiments are being carried out at its 3D wave basin CCOB (Cantabria Coastal and Ocean Basin), which is equipped with a multi-directional wave generator, a portable wind generator and a current generator, allowing the study of floating or fixed offshore foundations.

Two foundations with different scour protection systems are being simultaneously tested, with the protection of the first jacket being a frond mats system and on the second a conventional one made with rocks, the institute said, adding that the tests will allow comparing the performance of the two protection systems, as well as collecting information for the definition of monitoring and maintenance requirements.

During the experiments, the interaction among the jacket foundation, the scour protection and the moving bed will be evaluated under several combinations of wave and currents conditions. Furthermore, due to the presence of sand waves in East Anglia, UK, the physical experiments are being carried out reproducing the presence of sand waves, IHCantabria said.

The evaluation of the scour protection response, as well as the sand waves’ evolution, will be analyzed through the execution of individual tests and cumulative tests, executing six sea states in a row.

The experiments are performed in the framework of the SPJ (Scour Protection Jacket) project, founded by SODERCAN through the call I+C=+C 2016 and developed by the consortium composed of Ingecid, Iberdrola Renovables and IHCantabria.

Located 43km off the Suffolk Coast in the UK, East Anglia ONE will consist of 102 Siemens 7MW wind turbines scheduled to be fully commissioned in 2020.