EU Researchers Join Hands to Tackle Monopile Scour

European scour researchers have kicked off PROTEUS, a new EU Hydralab+ project, which aims to improve the design of scour protection around offshore wind turbine monopiles and future-proof them against the impacts of climate change.

The PROTEUS (PRotection of Offshore wind Turbine monopilEs against Scouring) project will see a series of large-scale experiments conducted at HR Wallingford’s Fast Flow Facility (FFF) in the UK over a period of seven weeks.

According to HR Wallingford, extending the lifetime of foundations represents another potential for reducing the costs of offshore wind turbines, a goal the study also strives to attain.

“Foundation costs represent 20% of the total costs in the case of a monopile, of which a significant proportion is related to the foundation’s scour protection. This makes it vital to improve and reduce the cost of monopile scour protection design,” said Prof. Peter Troch, Lead Researcher and coordinator of the project and Head of the Civil Engineering Department of Ghent University.

“We also need to consider the influence of climate change which will increase the design storm conditions and influence the scour protection stability. Therefore, research towards a risk-based design will help to evaluate how well scour protection which is already installed performs, and improve the design of future scour protection adapted to climate change.”

Besides HR Wallingford, PROTEUS partners are Ghent University, Ludwig-Franzius Institute for Hydraulic, University of Hannover, University of Porto, Belgian Department of Mobility and Public Works, and International Marine and Dredging Consultants (IMDC nv).

Hydralab+ is funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program and is committed to bringing together facilities and researchers in experimental hydraulic and hydrodynamics.