16th C. W. Lovell Distinguished Lecture
4:30 p.m., Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Lawson Hall, Room 1142, Purdue University
Professor Guy T. Houlsby
Oxford University
"Geotechnical Engineering Challenges for Offshore Renewable Energy"
The lecture will address the context of the development of offshore renewable energy and the challenges that this poses for a geotechnical engineer. This has led to an interest in design of very large diameter piles subjected to complex, cyclic lateral loading.
The lecture will give an outline of the recently-completed PISA project, in which new methods for the design of monopiles were developed. The project was carried out by Oxford University, Imperial College and University College Dublin and sponsored by the Carbon Trust, Ørsted (previously DONG Energy) and a consortium of companies from the offshore wind industry. It involved field testing, finite element analysis and development of new design methods.
The lecture will also look briefly at some other options for offshore renewables.
About Professor Guy T. Houlsby
Guy Houlsby has been Professor of Civil Engineering at Oxford University since 1991, and was Head of the Department of Engineering Science from 2009-2014, leading the Department’s REF2014 submission which achieved the highest quality score of any engineering department in the UK.
He is an internationally recognized expert on geotechnical engineering, where his main interest is in offshore foundations. Applications include structures for the oil and gas industry, but more particularly in recent years for offshore wind turbines. He also works in theoretical soil mechanics and plasticity theory, developing a rigorous thermodynamically-based approach to constitutive modelling. His current work brings together these two threads of work, developing models for cyclic loading of foundations for offshore wind turbines.
His interests in renewable energy also include work on tidal power. Analytical and numerical methods are used to understand tidal resources at scales from a single device through to a tidal basin. The patented “Transverse Horizontal Axis Water Turbine” (THAWT) for extracting tidal stream energy is currently being developed; and he is a Director of Kepler Energy, the spin-out company from Oxford University promoting THAWT.
His research is supported by government funding and co-operation with industry, especially in the offshore sector. He regularly lectures in the UK and abroad, and in 2014 gave the prestigious Rankine Lecture on “Interactions in Offshore Foundation Design”, invited by the British Geotechnical Association. He acts as a consultant in civil, geotechnical and offshore engineering, including legal and arbitration cases.
His first degree and PhD are from Cambridge University. In 2003 he was awarded a DSc degree by Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers and of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
