Offshore Engineering and Energy

Our research advances fundamental understanding of the offshore environment and enables design of systems for generating useful energy from the abundant natural resources of wind, tidal streams and ocean waves. Focus areas include understanding, simulation and prediction of:

- Design wave conditions critical for offshore infrastructure design, particularly of steep and breaking waves in realistic directionally spread wave-fields and due to interaction with changes of depth and current.

- Floating wave energy system response enabling innovations in device design including the multi-mode M4 concept and in power take-off control enhancing power performance.

- Turbulent marine flows and their impact on unsteady loading and wake characteristics of tidal stream turbines and offshore infrastructure such as support structures and transmission cables.

- Interaction of atmospheric flows with offshore wind farms to predict farm-scale wakes impacting power production of down-wind farms and loading of turbines within arrays.

- Prediction of the loading and response of floating structures supporting offshore turbines. Integrated design tools have been developed for holistic analysis of fully coupled rotor-tower-floater-mooring systems enabling control methodologies to mitigate load variation, optimise performance and maximise safe operation.

The group develops and employs a range of techniques including Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and OceanWave3D for analysis of wave mechanics, development and use of CFD codes such as the in-house Large Eddy Simulation code Digital Offshore Farms Simulator (DOFAS) for turbulent atmospheric- and marine- flows and interaction with wind- and tidal-stream turbines, the atmospheric flow solver Weather Research and Forecasting for wind resource and farm wake assessment, the CFD code STREAM and coupled wave-structure-mooring interaction models such as OREGEN.

Numerical and analytical developments are underpinned by physical validation through analysis of full-scale datasets, typically in collaboration with industrial partners and experimental campaigns conducted in external facilities and in our recently re-commissioned Hydrodynamics Laboratory.