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Project Overview

Vision

Excellence and Importance

Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE), and particularly Offshore Wind (OW) energy, is critical for the UK to reach its net zero and energy security targets. The UK's current installed OW capacity of 14GW will need to increase to 50GW by 2030 (~£17bn/year investment), leading to OW accounting for over 60% of the UK's energy mix. 5GW will be floating OW. By 2050, over 120GW of OW capacity will be installed by an industry employing approximately 200,000 people.

Much of this new capacity will be in deeper waters and more challenging environmental conditions, requiring new and better technical solutions, as well as a general upscaling of deployment and a move to industrialization of all technical solutions.

Addressing Stakeholder Needs

The successful deployment of ORE is underpinned by geotechnical engineers being able to understand and predict the interaction of supporting structures, moorings, and other enabling works (cable ploughing, spudcans for jack-up vessels, etc.) with the seabed. These interactions share similar characteristics:

  • Truly three-dimensional
  • Involve large deformation soil-structure interaction
  • Include contact and friction effects
  • Exhibit history-dependent non-linear soil behaviour

However, the industry lacks a convenient, accurate, and robust modelling framework to predict these processes, instead relying on:

  • Empirical models
  • Individual experience
  • "Wished-in-place" numerical analyses that ignore installation effects
  • Expensive field trials with limited generality

Timeliness

The proposal is timely in terms of both MPM technical advancements and current industry direction. We are at the cusp of a step change in the rate of deployment and in operation environments. Technical innovations achieved over the last 10 years at Durham University mean that it is now possible to use the MPM to efficiently model challenging geotechnical problems.

Now is the time to facilitate the industry's use of the latest developments in numerical modelling and capitalize on extensive research, validation, and benchmarking already conducted on the MPM to deliver an internationally accessible engineering software tool.

Objectives

This industry-initiated proposal builds on Durham University's track record in using the Material Point Method for offshore wind geotechnical engineering problems to address this technical gap. The project has five core objectives:

1. Transition Fundamental MPM Advances

Transition the fundamental MPM technical advances made at Durham University over the last 10 years into industry-accessible, useable, and robust modelling software.

2. Demonstrate MPM Capabilities

Demonstrate the ability of the MPM to model key, ORE industry-important, large deformation soil-structure interaction problems in areas driven by problems faced by industry partners.

3. Expand Material Models

Increase the available (but existing) soil material models to meet industry expectations and expand the scope of problems amenable to simulation with the MPM software.

4. Facilitate Community Adoption

Streamline, support, enhance, and facilitate the use of the MPM within the ORE community via industry workshops to:

  • Gather end user feedback
  • Scope interaction, features, and development of the software
  • Train users in the use of the software

5. Provide Proof of Concept

Provide the proof of concept, stress testing by industry, and underpinning market justification for future commercialization in collaboration with the supporting software partner (Oasys).

Expected Outcomes and Impact

A. New Software Tool for the ORE Industry

Provide the ORE industry with a new, focused, and maintainable software tool that empowers engineers to:

  • Model problems that are not possible with current tools
  • Optimize solutions to site-specific conditions (cable burial depths, foundation selection)
  • Reduce risk with expensive offshore operations (ploughing for cable installation, use of jack-ups in diverse soil conditions, site investigation inverse analysis)

B. Risk Reduction and Management

Geotechnical aspects of ORE account for a significant proportion of capital and ongoing costs, whilst containing considerable uncertainty. One example is OW cabling that represents 34% of installation costs and 83% of all insurance claims. These costs and risks could be reduced or better managed if the industry had access to efficient tools to model the physical processes.

This would reduce operational uncertainty, leading to more appropriate equipment specification and installation requirements via software providing a digital twin of site-specific conditions.

C. Quantifying Soil State Benefits

Large deformation installation of offshore infrastructure changes the seabed. The proposed software would allow quantification of the state of the soil post-installation and account for this in subsequent analysis (e.g., densification impact on capacity).

Combined, this proposal will help to lower the Levelized Cost of Energy by reducing uncertainty (and conservatism) and improving technical solutions in offshore geotechnics. It will fill a vital technical gap necessary for supporting the UK's target to achieve net zero by 2050.

Beneficiaries

The primary beneficiary of this project is the ORE geotechnical community, focused on industry practitioners but also including R&D members. Project partners represent all geotechnical aspects of offshore wind, from consent and design to deployment and commissioning.

This proposal is driven by stakeholders who face problems that they cannot efficiently and consistently solve using currently available tools. They do not have the expertise to develop tools in-house and, even if they did, it would not be an effective use of the community's time to duplicate such development across multiple organizations.

The key benefit to partners will be empowering them to solve their own large deformation soil-structure problems using validated, benchmarked, efficient, trusted, and open software without dramatically changing their existing workflows.

Application Areas

The software will support more optimized solutions in the following application areas:

  • Seabed ploughing, including boulder interaction
  • Foundation installation and removal (monopiles, screw piles, suction caissons, etc.)
  • Site investigation, including cone penetration tests
  • Anchor penetration (drag, deep penetrating, and mooring anchors)
  • Spudcan penetration, stability, and removal

This is a rapidly developing area due to the transition from predominantly fixed-bottom OW turbines to a focus on floating OW, and it is expected that application areas will evolve driven by industry needs.

Beyond ORE

Other stakeholders beyond the focus of this bid include geotechnical colleagues working on other problems involving large deformation soil-structure interaction, such as slope stability and run-out analysis.