Literature review of research on scour propagation below the submarine pipeline

Abstract

The scour process is closely related to the damage and failure of pipelines, so the study of the flow field around pipelines and the sediment transport below pipelines is especially important. Furthermore, the effects of scour propagation below submarine pipelines especially around span shoulders have significant meaning for the study of hydraulics and sediment transport in the ocean. In this paper, investigations in this area are considered and summarized with respect to the different methods of studying the mechanisms: experiment and numerical simulation. The main achievements are presented and compared. The majority of these achievements were derived from experiments because of the lack of a precise theory of sediment transport below pipelines and the difficulties of generating numerical simulations. The different devices used to monitor the scour process are discussed in this paper, and a new way of measuring the scour process is proposed which can be used in laboratory experiments.