Seminario "Marine Scour: Lessons from Nature’s Classroom"

Potenza - 10 febbraio - ore 10.30 - Campus di Macchia Romana (l'aula Amatucci, Ingegneria )

Seminario dal titolo : "Marine Scour: Lessons from Nature’s Classroom" tenuto dal Dr. John Harris - Technical Director HR Wallingford.

Scour associated with anthropogenic activities in the marine environment has exercised the minds of scientists and engineers for decades. Despite the advances in understanding there remain areas of uncertainty which require further examination and challenges that require further research. Whilst real-life scour problems often help formulate the questions for detailed laboratory experiments, the associated information is less often used to answer some of those questions and yet the available data can offer the chance of exploring the issues associated with scour at full-scale using real marine soils, albeit with all the inherent uncertainty associated with measurements obtained in the field. It can be argued that through the interpretation of these data, it forces the scientist and engineer to not only explore in more detail the limitations of the measurements but to engage in the full range of processes, whether physical (e.g. hydrodynamics and meteorological forcing) or biological (e.g. marine growth, benthic organisms) that impact on structures placed in what are often, very challenging environments. The lecture will present seabed monitoring data collected primarily as part of offshore wind developments in European waters and demonstrate how this has helped to drive many of the recent research questions in marine scour as well as start to provide some insight into the behaviour of seabed/ structure interaction in a range of environments, in what we term “Nature’s Classroom”.