Wind Farm Engineering

Engineering Experience in Tomorrow’s Technology
Wind farms will play a major role in the future of renewable energy, both in the UK and worldwide. The UK government has targeted 15% renewable energy by 2020. In order to achieve this target, proposals are being drawn up to build 3000 offshore turbines generating 33 GW by 2020.

Modern higher capacity turbines require larger foundations than the current designs and this possesses unique design challenges. The design of these turbine structures and foundations requires specialist understanding of soil-structure interaction and cyclic behaviour of the foundation. KW’s knowledge and experience in seabed characterisation, pile design and soil-structure interaction ideally places us at the forefront for this specialist design, analysis and assessment of foundation designs for offshore windfarms.

KW Ltd already has an international reputation for excellence in pipe/soil interaction designs.

Technical Capability
• Front End Engineering and Design (FEED) – foundation feasibility study, review of site conditions and preliminary foundation sizing.
• Design and stability assessment of foundations.
• Conventional P-Y curve and limit equilibrium methods are supplemented by nonlinear FEA as required for foundation design.
• Seabed mobility and erosion assessment.
• Specialist R&D services – foundation design verification
by centrifuge testing.
• State of the art structural design software is used to developed efficient structure.
• Extensive experience in offshore structural dynamics
and fatigue analysis.
• Installation analysis of fixed and subsea structures.

R&D Technology Transfer
KW is committed to pushing frontier research and improving current designs. We are collaborating, together
with Dong Energy and Renewable Energy Systems, with
Cambridge University in a three-year project ‘Cyclic
behaviour of Monopile Foundations for Offshore Wind Farms’.

The project aims to understand the behaviour of large diameter (~7m) monopiles in clay layers of contrasting stiffness and subjected to cyclic lateral and moment loading. Understanding the long-term behaviour of large diameter monopiles subject to axial and cyclic lateral loading is of vital importance to the successful and economic design of foundations for future wind farms.