Thursday 5 April 2018

The power of collaboration


Hallo Leute,

The past three months have been very exciting. Let’s start from the beginning…

The collaboration with the colleagues from COWI resulted in a paper published at the Twenty-eighth (2018) International Ocean and Polar Engineering Conference (ISOPE), which will be held in Sapporo, Japan.
Paper submitted at the ISOPE conference
We are very satisfied with the outcome of the paper because after some months of hard work we found a new simplified methodology to evaluate the tilting of the foundations under cyclic loading. The main goal of this research is to fill the lack of the a generally accepted unified method to account for cyclic loading which is still a main challenge on the design of offshore foundations. There are quite some points now to dig deeper in order to make this method more robust and attractive. So stay tuned🔜
Poster presentation during ImpDay#1
Soon after that it was time to get ready for the Implementation Day #1 (there will be two more) which was organized jointly with BASt and the German Federal Highway Research Institute, in Bergisch Gladbach (Germany). The aim of this day was to collaborate in groups with our fellow ESR and implement practical applications, based on our knowledge developed during our own research and of course with the help of the our supervisors.
Joey (ESR8 research in COWI A/S) and I started to collaborate in early February. My topic is on offshore geotechnical engineering while his topic is on offshore structural engineering. Therefore, we found immediately something to work with and have fun.  
If we think about the design of wind turbines, we can imagine that it relies on knowledge of different engineering disciplines with multiple interfaces. An example is the soil-structure interaction for which iterative loops between the wind turbine manufacturer and the foundation designer are needed to update the load calculations at the interface level (the contact between the soil and the foundation). Therefore, in order to have a satisfactory design, a close collaboration between the geotechnical and structural engineersis necessary.
In our group project, we simulate this synergy between the two disciplines of civil engineering by studying the sensitivity of offshore gravity base foundations loads with respect to soil variability. The poster that we did is here:
Research developed with Joey (ESR8)
It was very interesting to implement this link and deal with the challenges that engineers should overcome during the design of an offshore wind turbin.

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