IROE research on show at CPT’22 Bologna
Dr Jared Charles, Research Fellow in Offshore Renewable Energy whose research is supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies Centre of Excellence for Intelligent and Resilient Ocean Engineering (IROE) recently presented his research demonstrating the potential use of genetic algorithms to find an offshore windfarm layout with the lowest total foundation cost and CPT’22 in Bologna, Italy.
The work, “Coupling site wide CPT profiles and genetic algorithms for whole-site offshore windfarm layout optimization”, utilised the publicly available site investigation dataset from the Burbo Bank windfarm (provided by the Crown Estate) shows the potential of Big Data and Machine Learning techniques in solving geotechnical problems. Windfarm layout is typically focussed on maximising wind energy generation potential, a very important factor, with this work showing that in the future, geotechnical considerations can be included in any such optimisation. The paper is co-authored by Susan Gourvenec, Chair in Emerging Technologies for Intelligent and Resilient Ocean Engineering and Mark Vardy, Director and Head of R&D SAND Geophysics. University of Southampton undergraduate Etienne Martin contributed towards some of the initial work of this project during a summer internship in 2021.
Also attending CPT’22 was David White, Professor of Infrastructure Geotechnics, who presented an invited lecture “CPT equipment: Recent advances and future perspectives”, summarising the range of novel techniques in in-situ CPT testing that have been developed in recent years along with those that are currently under development. David also presented a poster titled “Characterisation of near-surface sediments using a blend of vertical and shallow rotational penetrometers” with collaborators from the University of Cambridge and University of Western Australia. IROE team members also featured in the University of Bristol led poster on recently awarded EPSRC funded project ROBOCONE.
You can download any of the papers from the conference via the open access proceedings here and view the posters presented by Jared, David and James below.
