Abstract
Tidal turbines have emerged as a promising alternative to fossil-fuel-based energy generation, with estuarine environments identified as potential sites for their deployment. However, estuaries are sensitive ecosystems, and understanding the impacts of turbine installation on local hydrodynamics and sediment transport is critical. While previous studies have shown the influence of turbines on seabed morphology under steady current conditions, the effects of combined wave–current loading remain insufficiently explored. In this study, we present a novel numerical modeling framework to predict seabed evolution in the vicinity of tidal turbines subjected to wave–current interactions. The approach integrates Blade Element Theory (BET) to represent turbine-induced forces, an Euler–Euler multiphase model for sediment transport, and the first-order wave theory to capture wave dynamics, all implemented within the OpenFOAM-based solver. Wave effects are incorporated as source terms in the momentum equations, and wave velocities are added to the current field at the velocity inlet boundary condition. Results demonstrate that wave–current loading induces oscillatory sediment transport, but net scouring remains significant in the vicinity of the turbine. The proposed framework is validated component-wise (wave forcing and rotor loading) and then demonstrated on mobile-bed simulations to quantify how oscillatory wave–current forcing modifies near-bed transport and early-stage scour development around a tidal turbine. While the present simulations focus on short morphodynamic times, the approach provides a physics-based basis for exploring wave effects on turbine-induced sediment dynamics.