Led by: Professor Thomas Adcock, University of Oxford, and Professor Ye Li, Shanghai Jiao Tong University EPSRC funding: £799,386
The aim of this project is to improve the design methodology for offshore wind turbine farms, leading to a reduction in environmental impact, reduction in design uncertainties and ultimately reduced cost of energy.
Key themes that will be addressed include: the modelling of the ocean environment in typhoon conditions in potential candidate areas for offshore turbines in China; the creation of realistic environmental load time-histories on turbines; analysis of the structural and geotechnical design of turbines under ultimate state limit and fatigue loadings; and activities aimed at the establishment of long-term collaboration between the UK and China partners.
Tom Adcock is an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford and Official Fellow at St Peter’s College. He completed his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Oxford. After a short spell in industry he returned to Oxford as a post doc before taking up his current role in 2012. His work looks at how engineers understand the marine environment.
His research looks at the ocean environment — at how we can use it to our advantage and how we can design against it. Particular interests are rogue waves, tidal energy, tsunamis and storm surges. My work on tidal power has featured in various national newspapers and has been discussed in the Scottish parliament. In 2015 I was interviewed about rogue waves on The Today Programme.
Ton van den Bremer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, and Tutor and Fellow in Engineering in Worcester College.
His research interests are in geophysical fluid mechanics, understanding the role of non-linearity in oceanic and atmospheric gravity waves. For his Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship, Ton is examining the role of waves in the transport and spreading of plastic pollution in the ocean. He also has an interest in stochastic processes, applied to the economics of natural resources and climate.
As part of the project, Ton van den Bremer will examine the evolution of waves from deep water onto the top of slopes, where increases in the probability of extreme waves have been observed and offshore wind turbines are planned.
Alistair Borthwick has 40 years’ engineering in civil engineering, and was a member of the design team of the Hutton Tension Leg Platform (the world’s first vertically moored, floating oil platform for deep water applications) which won the Queen’s Award for Technological Achievement in 1984. He is Professor of Applied Hydrodynamics at The University of Edinburgh, an Emeritus Fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and holds honorary professorships at Peking University, NUI Galway, Wuhan University, China University of Geosciences, University College Cork, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He was previously Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, where he worked for 21 years from 1990-2011. He was Head of Civil & Environmental Engineering at University College Cork from 2011-13, where he was the Founding Director of the SFI Centre for Marine and Renewable Energy Ireland. Prof. Borthwick’s research interests include environmental fluid mechanics, coastal and offshore processes, and marine renewable energy. Prof. Borthwick was awarded the title of Dr honoris causa by Budapest Műegyetem for contributions to Civil Engineering in 2016. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Paul is an early career researcher interested in the physics of ocean waves and tidal currents. He obtained a BE with first class honours in Civil Engineering from the National University of Ireland Galway in 2011, an MSc with distinction in Sustainable Energy Systems from the University of Edinburgh in 2012, and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2017.
Paul’s doctoral studies were supervised by Prof. Alistair Borthwick, Dr Vengatesan Venugopal, and Prof. Thomas Adcock (University of Oxford), and focused on both the social and ecological impacts of marine energy and the optimal arrangement of turbines in tidal channels. Paul joined the Tidal Energy Research Group at the University of Oxford in late 2016, where he assisted Prof Thomas Adcock and Dr Wei-Koon Lee (Universiti Teknologi MARA) in making a robust assessment of the Malaysian tidal stream power resource.
My name is Anela Bajric-Hodzic and I am currently a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant at the University of Oxford, in the Department of Engineering. I obtained my doctorate degree in Mechanical Engineering in December 2017 at the Technical University of Denmark on the topic of structural damping. During my MSc studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, my curiosity to understand the underlying mechanisms of the dynamics and vibrations encountered in structures exposed to severe dynamic excitations, was sparked. I have since worked on multiple projects regarding structural dynamics of small and large scale structures.
I am participating in Work Package 4.1, which focuses on holistic structural design of offshore wind turbine generators in extreme conditions in coastal regions of China. The characteristic soil conditions govern the design of monopile foundations, together with the extreme wave and wind loads that such structure will experience in this environment. The extreme loading from waves and wind will be accounted for in a coupled aeroelastic model integrating the state of the art foundation models to identify the design drivers in ultimate-, serviceability and fatigue limit state. Thereby the significance of the structural loading, structural dynamics and foundation design can be quantified for future scales of offshore wind turbines. This will ultimately result in an overview of design drivers associated with future scales of offshore wind turbine generators in coastal regions of China. In parallel, the design overview will enable an investigation of the necessary sensor layout for subsequent structural, wave and wind load identification in extreme conditions, through monitored data
Dr Xingya Feng is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant in the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford. Dr Feng is working on the UK-China project ‘Extreme Wave Loads on Offshore Wind Turbines’ with Prof. Thomas Adcock and Prof. Richard Willden. Dr Feng is a hydrodynamist.
Dr Feng obtained his B. Eng degree in Hydraulic Engineering (Honoured program) from the Hohai Unviersity, China in 2011. Dr Feng took his PhD study in the National University of Singapore (NUS) between 2011-2015 with the research topic 'Hydrodynamic analysis of wave interaction with marine multi-body systems'. Upon graduation he continued his research as a research fellow in NUS in 2016. He then joined the industry and worked for the classification society Bureau Veritas (Singapore) as a R&D Engineer in 2017. After a year in industry, Dr Feng joined the Environmental Fluid Mechanics group at the University of Oxford in 2018.
Dr Feng's research focuses on hydrodynamic analysis of wave-structure interactions. His work includes study of nonlinear water waves and their interactions with offshore structures, development of potential-flow based numerical models for free surface flows, and harmonic analysis of higher-order nonlinear wave loads. He has experiences with both potential flow models and CFD. His research interest includes environmental fluid mechanics, offshore and coastal engineering, ship hydrodynamics, wave statistics and offshore renewable energy. His publication can be found in Google Scholar.
I obtained my undergraduate degree in naval architecture and ocean engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 2011. I then pursued my master degree of science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), China. Particularly, I primarily worked on Hydrodynamics and VIM of a deep-draft semisubmersible concept designed for the South China Sea during the 2.5 years at SJTU. In August 2014, I moved to Trondheim, Norway due to a PhD position there. I stayed in the Department of Energy and Process Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. My PhD project works on fluid dynamics: wave-shear current interaction. I obtained my PhD degree in 2017 and then continued this topic in the same group for one more year as a postdoctoral researcher. I moved to Oxford at the end of August 2018, and am currently staying in the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, as a postdoctoral research assistant in wave modeling. My current project deals with surface waves propagating over varying bathymetry, focusing on the formation mechanism of rogue/freak/giant waves in a non-equilibrium state.
My research interests are in general broad. I am interested in (not limited to) water waves, wave-structure interaction, wave-current interaction, ocean wave models, and loads on offshore structures.
Dr Ye Li received his PhD from Mechanical Engineering Department at UBC in 2007. He is now a professor at School of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Civil Engineering Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), the founding director of SJTU Multiple functional towing tank, the founding director of NDRC National Center for Offshore Wind Technology, Associate Fellow of AIAA and senior member of IEEE. He is internationally recognized for his expertise in offshore technology and for his extensive works in theoretical, numerical and experimental studies on fluid-structure interaction. He is an associate editor of ASME Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering, Renewable Energy, Renewable Energy and Sustainable Energy Review, AIP Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy and many others. Prior to joining SJTU, he was the ocean modeling effort leader and a senior scientist at U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). In the past several years, he leaded or participated in many industrial projects in the field of offshore renewable energy, such as Goldwind 3MW and 6MW offshore wind turbine project, CPT 100kW wave energy project, OPT 150kW wave energy project, Principle Power 3MW offshore wind project, and Verdant Power 300kW tidal current energy project.
Dr Xiaoni Wu received her PhD from Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at National University of Singapore in 2017. She is now a postdoctoral research fellow at School of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Civil Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU).
Her research focuses on the theoretical and numerical study of geotechnical issues of offshore foundation systems. She has been working on the stability problem of suction caisson, suction embedded plate anchor and drag embedded anchor, and the development of numerical technique of large deformation finite element. She is now working on the response of monopile foundation for offshore wind turbines in the NSFC-RCUK_EPSRC Grant project “Extreme wind and wave loads on the next generation of offshore wind turbines” at SJTU.
