IROE researchers participate in Supergen ORE Annual Assembly

IROE early-career researchers attended Supergen ORE Annual Assembly

Dr Yuting Zhang, Dr Abigail Bateman, Dr Katherine Kwa, and Dr Kai Wen, early-career researchers in IROE, participated in the 2026 Supergen ORE Annual Assembly hosted by University of Warwick from April 22-23, 2026, along with Southampton ORE Supergen Co-Director Prof Dave White.

The Supergen Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Hub is established to bring together and stimulate synergistic, high-impact research that supports and accelerates the development of offshore wind, wave, and tidal technologies for the benefit of society. The Annual Assembly plays a central role in this effort, serving as a key platform to define and prioritise research directions. It brings the community together to identify where research can be most effectively targeted, helping to unlock opportunities and drive sustainable growth in offshore renewable energy.

Dr Bateman presented her research on reliability-based design of offshore wind gravity foundations. Her study demonstrates a novel method that can produce fast reliability-based assessments, important in early-stage design.

Dr Zhang presented his research on the integration of geophysical and geotechnical data to support offshore foundation design. His study introduces several machine learning techniques to predict shear wave velocity from cone penetration test data, demonstrating significantly higher accuracy than existing empirical methods. Moreover, various uncertainty quantification approaches are proposed to assess the uncertainties associated with these predictions, which is important for end users when evaluating their reliability.