Unlike the pier scour in bridge waterways,the local scour at offshore monopile foundations should take into account the effect of wave-current combination.Under the condition of wave-current coexistence,the water-soil interfacial scouring is usually coupled with the pore-pressure dynamics inside of the seabed.The aforementioned wave/current-pile-soil coupling process was physically modeled with a specially designed flow-structure-soil interaction flume.Experimental results indicate that superimposing a current onto the waves obviously changes the pore-pressure and the flow velocity at the bed around the pile.The concomitance of horseshoe vortex and local scour hole around a monopile proves that the horseshoe vortex is one of the main controlling mechanisms for scouring development under the combined waves and current.Based on similarity analyses,an average-velocity based Froude number(Fra)is proposed to correlate with the equilibrium scour depth(S/D)at offshore monopile foundation in the combined waves and current.An empirical expression for the correlation between S/D and Fra is given for predicting equilibrium scour depth,which may provide a guide for offshore engineering practice.