PhD-position WindSoil

The Faculty of Engineering, Department Toegepaste mechanica, is looking for a PhD-student with a doctoral grant. 

More concretely your work package, for the preparation of a doctorate, contains: 

If you are interested in offshore wind energy, data processing and machine learning, we offer you a challenging research position with high industrial relevance within OWI-lab (VUB).

OWI-lab was founded in 2010 to support R&D in the field of offshore wind energy in Belgium. OWI-lab has years of experience in performing measurements on wind turbines and thus has access to the largest research database filled with long-term data. With this data, we conduct industrial research together with our partners, the results of which flow back for better management and design of this essential infrastructure.

You will be part of a young and dynamic research team in an international environment characterised by collegial respect and academic freedom.

You will work on the project WindSoil. The overall goal of the project is to build a "Digital Twin" of offshore wind turbines. Unique to the research is the combination of the structural information from our database and a wide range of in-situ measurements. This will allow us to build the best possible model of the offshore wind turbine, its digital twin.

Starting from the state of the art in modelling offshore wind turbines, you and your teammates will be able to build a finite element model for each turbine under investigation. This research further focuses on using the measurement data to update this model until it matches reality as closely as possible. This will allow the digital twin to be updated in real time with the latest measurements and translate any variations in the measurements directly into changes in the structure. This should allow operators to identify basic problems such as soil degradation or erosion. In addition, a true digital twin will allow to improve existing models as well as our prediction of residual turbine life.  Similarly, the digital twin can also serve for virtual monitoring concepts, where the measured displacements are laid directly to the digital twin to estimate the remaining lifetime of all welds on the foundation.To arrive at an effective monitoring strategy and an industry-accepted data-driven lifetime estimate, the uncertainties associated with the use of these models and monitoring concepts in particular need to be further understood and assessed. This may be applicable

For this function, our Brussels Humanities, Sciences & Engineering Campus (Elsene) will serve as your home base.