Scour dynamic properties and online monitoring of offshore wind power foundation

Because of favorable wind resource conditions and a lack of land occupation limitations, offshore wind power has been gaining an increasingly important role in the global energy strategy. However, scour is a widespread problem around offshore wind power foundations, resulting in a decrease in foundation bearing capacity, changes in structural natural frequency, and submarine pipeline exposure. As a result, monitoring and early warning of scour are essential.

This study studied the scour process and its dynamic characteristics before proposing a method for identifying the scour initiation in design. For scour monitoring, multibeam sonars, the most often used scour measurement method, have problems of high cost and discontinuous operation, making it impossible to provide on-site scour data in a timely manner. Herein, a method for scour monitoring using structural vibration frequency is proposed. Then, based on ABAQUS, an integrated model of a wind turbine tower foundation was established to study the correlation between the scour depth and the first-order natural frequency, and the feasibility of using the structural vibration frequency to estimate the scour depth. As a result, a scour monitoring method and system based on low-frequency vibration data were developed. The data is acquired in real time by vibration sensors installed in specific parts and processed using a fast Fourier transform after data filtering to obtain the time-domain and frequency-domain characteristics necessary to determine whether the scour is normal.

The numerical simulation results revealed that the first-order frequency of the structure was basically linear with the scour depth and that the frequency decreased by 0.009 3 Hz (3.3%), 0.017 2Hz (6.3%) and 0.027 0 Hz (10.2%) for the scour depths of 3.0 m, 6.0 m and 9.0 m, respectively, compared to the scour-free condition (0.281 2 Hz). The monitoring data from an offshore wind farm in Jiangsu revealed that: (1) The installation orientation and height of the vibration sensors had essentially little effect on the first-order frequency; however, the vibration amplitude decreased as the installation elevation drops. (2) The variations of scour depth and frequency were basically consistent with the numerical results: the scour depths of turbine units #7, #15 and #17 increased from 3.47 m, 5.21 m and 6.11 m in September 2019 to 5.12 m, 5.48 m and 6.95 m in April 2020, while their vibration frequencies decreased from November 2019 to July 2020 by 0.001 3 Hz, 0.001 1 Hz and 0.002 3 Hz, respectively.

Due to the lack of monitoring data, the frequency and scour depth do not fully correspond in time and space. There is an inconsistency between the change in frequency and scour depth of different units, but the monitoring data of all units show that the correlation between the two is clear. As a result, this paper suggests that when the frequency drops by more than 0.010 0 Hz in operation, the system will issue an early warning message prompting the cause of the accident to be investigated. The paper further discussed the future direction of the scour monitoring improvement, and the study results can be used as a reference for similar projects worldwide.