Local Scour Mechanisms and Prediction Methods Around Offshore Wind Turbine Foundations: Insights and Future Directions

Local scour around offshore wind turbine foundations presents a considerable challenge due to its potential influence on structural stability, driven by hydrodynamic forces. While research has made strides in comprehending scouring mechanisms, notable complexities persist, specifically with newer foundation types. Addressing these limitations is vital for advancing our understanding of scour mechanisms and for improving mitigation strategies in offshore wind energy development. This review synthesizes current findings on local scour across various offshore foundations, encompassing field observations, data-driven approaches, turbulence-sediment interactions, scour evolution processes, influencing factors, and numerical model advancements. The objective is to enrich our understanding of local scour mechanisms. In addition, future research directions are outlined, including the development of robust artificial intelligence models for accurate predictions, the exploration of vortex structure characteristics, and the refinement of numerical models to strengthen prediction capabilities while minimizing computational efforts.