Methods for predicting seabed scour around marine current turbine

Marine energy sources are able to make significant contributions to future energy demands. Marine current has huge potential to supply renewable energy as compared to the other energy sources. Marine environment is harsh for the installation and operation of marine current turbine (MCT). Seabed scour around marine current turbine is induced when the flow suppression occurs at the seabed. Seabed scour is widely recognised as a difficult engineering problem which is likely to cause structural instability. The study found that the previous works mainly focus on the bridge piers, wind turbines and ship propeller jets induced scour. Little information to date was found to predict the MCT induced scour. The current paper proposes the potential equations to predict the MCT induced scour. The study also recommends the consideration of the rotor into the existing equations for future research.