Seabed response to mooring lines for floating offshore wind

About the Project

This PhD scholarship is offered by the EPSRC CDT in Offshore Wind Energy Sustainability and Resilience; a partnership between the Universities of Durham, Hull, Loughborough and Sheffield. The successful applicant will undertake six months of training with the rest of the CDT cohort at the University of Hull before continuing their PhD research at the University of Sheffield.

Floating offshore wind turbines are anchored to the seabed by long mooring lines that must withstand decades of cyclic motion caused by wind, waves, and platform movement. These lines interact dynamically with the seabed, where repeated dragging and settling cause the sediment to deform and form trenches. These evolving seabed features change the line’s mechanical response and can affect the long-term stability and fatigue life of the mooring system. Current engineering design tools represent this interaction in simplified ways, unable to capture the grain-scale processes that govern trenching, remoulding, and pore-pressure variation.

This project will develop a new computational model to simulate seabed–mooring interaction at the particle scale. It will combine the Discrete Element Method (DEM), which tracks the motion and contact forces between individual sediment grains, with a lattice-based fluid solver representing the pore water. This coupled approach will make it possible to examine how sediments rearrange, lose strength, and generate excess pore pressures under cyclic loading. Using the Geotechnical Engineering Group’s in-house HYBIRD framework, the student will run high-performance simulations to investigate how soil density, permeability, and loading history influence trench formation and resistance degradation.

The findings will inform improved seabed models for floating wind design, helping the offshore sector develop safer, more reliable, and cost-efficient mooring systems while providing the candidate with advanced training in computational geomechanics and high-performance simulation.

Training & Development

Your training will begin with an intensive six-month programme at the University of Hull, drawing on the expertise and facilities of all four academic partners. It is supplemented by Continuing Professional Development (CPD), which is embedded throughout your 4-year research scholarship giving you a broad understanding of the breadth and depth of current and emerging offshore wind sector needs.

You will receive in-house training on multiphase DEM–LBM modelling and code development using the HYBIRD framework within the Geotechnical Engineering Group. Additional training in high-performance computing and version control will be provided through the University of Sheffield HPC Centre, complemented by CDT and professional workshops on numerical geomechanics and offshore renewables.

Entry Requirements

If you have received a First-class Honours degree, or a 2:1 Honours degree and a Masters, or a Distinction at Masters level with any undergraduate degree (or international equivalents) in Chemistry, Computer Science, Engineering or Physics, we would like to hear from you.

If you have not previously been educated in English, you will be required to provide evidence of your English language ability. We require an IELTS (or equivalent) score of 7.0 overall, with no less than 6.0 in each skill.

Guaranteed Interview Scheme

We offer a Guaranteed Interview Scheme for home fee status candidates who identify as Black or Black mixed or Asian or Asian mixed if they meet the programme entry requirements. This positive action is to support recruitment of under-represented ethnic groups to our programme and is an opt-in process.

Funding Notes

The AURA CDT is funded by EPSRC, allowing us to provide scholarships that cover fees plus a stipend set at the UKRI nationally agreed rates. These are currently £20,780 per annum at 2025/26 rates and will increase in line with the EPSRC guidelines for the subsequent years (subject to progress).

Our CDT scholarships are available to Home (UK) students. To be considered a Home student, you must have no restrictions on how long you can stay in the UK and have been ordinarily resident in the UK for at least 3 years prior to the start of the scholarship.