The PhD started formally on 4 May 2026, and the project description is now signed. This first entry sets out what the project is, in plain language, so that everything that follows on this log has a reference point.
The trade-off
An offshore wind substructure — the monopile, jacket, or floater that holds the turbine up — is today engineered as a one-off: a bespoke design for a specific site, optimized for that site's water depth, waves, and soil, and fabricated in low volume. The result is a near-optimal structure and thoroughly unoptimal production: no series, no learning curve, high unit cost.
The alternative is standardization: hold one design common across a family of sites. Fabrication yards get repetition, and repetition is where cost falls. But a common design must survive the most demanding site in the family — so at every milder site, it carries steel it doesn't need. That excess is the over-design penalty.
So standardization buys a manufacturing benefit at the price of structural over-design. Every developer and fabricator knows this trade exists. What doesn't exist — anywhere in the published literature — is a reproducible model that quantifies both sides at once and shows where, for a given site portfolio and order volume, the best compromises lie. The decision is made by judgment. This project's job is to make it computable.
Why it matters now
Bottom-fixed offshore wind already ran this experiment the slow way: over roughly fifteen years, the market converged on the monopile, which now dominates installed bottom-fixed foundations. That convergence is precious to this project — it is ground truth. A framework that cannot reproduce it computationally has the wrong parameters.
Floating wind is where the framework earns its keep. Substructure and foundation are roughly a quarter of floating capital expenditure — nearly three times the bottom-fixed share — and more than a hundred concepts are still competing. Floating wind does not have fifteen years to iterate its way to a standard. The standardize-or-customize decision has to be made at the front-end engineering design (FEED) stage, deliberately, with numbers.
The plan: four papers and a framework
The research follows a design science approach: the central output is an artefact — a coupling framework — that must be both rigorously built and demonstrably useful. It arrives in four steps:
- Systematic literature review (target: IJPE, late 2026). Map how Design-for-X, product-family thinking, substructure optimization, and production economics each treat the trade-off — and establish precisely where the coupling gap sits.
- The structural engine (target: Wind Energy Science / Applied Energy, 2027). A material-agnostic parametric engine, built on the open-source stack (WISDEM, RAFT, OpenFAST, MoorPy, OpenMDAO), that sizes physics-compliant substructures across site classes and reports the over-design penalty. Validated against the IEA 15 MW reference designs.
- The coupling framework (target: IJPE / Applied Energy, 2027–2028). The engine coupled to a production-economics layer via multi-objective optimization, producing the standardize-or-customize Pareto front — including the monopile retrodiction test.
- Evaluation and extension (target: IJPE / Production Planning & Control, 2028). Structured expert assessment with practitioners, plus extension to concrete and hybrid material variants.
Code is released alongside the papers. Reproducibility is a design requirement, not a courtesy.
What this log is for
Working notes, milestones, results, and dead ends — published when they happen, not reconstructed years later for the thesis. Next up: the systematic review is in full-text screening, and the first engine components are taking shape.
If you build, develop, or finance offshore wind substructures and any of this touches decisions you face, get in touch — the production-economics side of this framework is only as good as the fabrication reality behind it.