Protection of Offshore Pipelines with Adding a Longitudinal Blade beneath the Pipe

A number of experiments have been carried out in the current paper to investigate the effect of adding a longitudinal impermeable blade beneath the offshore pipelines on decreasing the scour around them. The main aim of this study was to reduce the hydraulics gradient beneath the pipe so that its magnitude recedes from the critical hydraulics gradient and therefore delays the onset of scour phenomenon or stops its process at all. Three pipes of different diameters were selected for the physical models of this study. Each pipe was tested using six blades with different relative widths. Also, a series of numerical simulations have been done using Flow3D software in which the similar boundary conditions as used for the physical models were applied. In both experimental and numerical investigations the reference sample that was an unprotected pipeline was first tested. Then blades with different relative widths (e.g, 0.05, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20, 0.25, 0.50) were added to the beneath of the pipeline and their performances were tested and analyzed against scour. The experimental and numerical results were in good agreement and they indicate a remarkable reduction in scour depth when a blade with the distinctive relative width was sticked to the pipeline.