Scholar Activities Intake 2023-2025

Aditya Shekhar is Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) in the field of Reliable Power Electronic Systems in Delft University of Technology since 2021 and developed the Power Electronics and Reliability Lab (The PEARL) where accelerated lifetime tests of power electronic modules can be performed. He completed his Phd in the topic of Reconfigurable DC Links from the same university in 2020. He has 15 Journals and  more than 30 conference papers on several research topics such as reliable power electronics, capacity enhanced medium voltage dc grids, smart charging of electric vehicles, modular multilevel converters, partial discharges in cables, series arc protection in dc micro-grids, wireless EV charging and solar roads.

Deborah Greaves is a Professor of Ocean Engineering, Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Decarbonisation and ORE, Director of the COAST Laboratory and was Head of the School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics (2016  -2022) at the University of Plymouth with previous appointments at the University of Oxford, UCL and the University of Bath. Her research interests include marine and offshore renewable energy, and physical and numerical modelling of wave-structure interaction.  She has led many national and international research projects concerning offshore renewable energy (ORE) in collaboration with industrial and academic partners, is Director of the EPSRC Supergen Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Hub and also leads the EPSRC High End Computing Consortium and Collaborative Computational Project in Wave-Structure Interaction.  She has published over 300 peer-reviewed papers, has secured over £35 million research income, has supervised 28 PhDs to completion and published with Wiley an edited book on Wave and Tidal Energy (2018). In the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, 2018, she was awarded an OBE for services to Marine Renewable Energy, Equalities, and Higher Education and in 2020, she was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She was appointed as a Member of EPSRC Council in 2022 and was awarded the Society of Underwater Technology (SUT) Lennard-Senior Prize 2024 for outstanding individual achievement in the field of marine renewable energy..

João C. C. Henriques was born in 1969 in Lisbon, Portugal. He obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 2006, all at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon. From 1993 to 2007, his main research topic was the development of numerical methods for the simulation of high speed compressible flows. Since 2008, his main research areas are the numerical and experimental modelling of wave energy converters (WECs), the control of the power take-off systems and the aerodynamic design of air turbines for oscillating water columns. He is currently an Associate Professor at IST.

Tomas Vyzikas is currently the Coordinator of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Doctoral Networks Engineering and ICT Panel, and in parallel lectures a full-term Master course about Climate Change at the Open University of Cyprus. Civil Engineering graduate from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, with MSc specialisation in Hydraulics and Environmental Engineering, and a keen interest in coastal, ocean engineering and marine renewable energy. His research during the PhD, funded under the EU project MERiFIC (Marine Energy in Far Peripheral and Island Communities) at Plymouth University, focused on the numerical modelling and physics on extreme ocean waves for the survivability of offshore structures. Since 2016, he works at Horizon funding programmes in different roles as Call Coordinator and Scientific Project Officer, and he is responsible for fruitful synergies in the areas of wind energy and blue economy.

Fernando Tejero was awarded a 5-year full-time diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Zaragoza (Spain) in 2011. Upon the successful completion of his postgraduate studies, he pursued a PhD in the topic of Flow Control in Aeronautics at the “Institute of Fluid Flow Machinery – Polish Academy of Sciences” in 2015. Fernando is involved in a wide range of research areas: computational fluid dynamics, numerical methods, multidisciplinary design optimization, data-driven methods and machine learning. He has an international standing built upon a well-established research track record and has been involved in research projects within the FP7 EU and Horizon 2020 programmes.As part of his teaching activities, Dr. Tejero is leading the CFD for gas turbine module which is part of the Thermal Power MSc programme. He is also the module leader for the Thermofluids course within premaster’s in Engineering. Dr. Tejero has received several fellowships throughout his career. This includes two grants for young researchers approved by the Spanish government and a Marie Curie fellowship to undertake his doctoral studies.

Pierpaolo Ricci is Chartered Engineer with more than fifteen years of experience in the marine and offshore industry. He has a MsC in mechanical engineering from the University of Bologna and a PhD in mechanical engineering from Instituto Superior Tecnico, University of Lisbon.  Dr. Ricci has cutting edge research experience in the offshore renewables and hands-on industry experience of design, construction and installation of floating structures. He has held several positions in Tecnalia, Global Matitime Consultancy, Orwell Offshore and Tadek Offshore. Currently, he works in SSE Renewables as Floating Wind Technical Authority.

Dr Josh Davidson is from Townsville, Australia, where he studied at James Cook University, earning a First Class Honours degree and a PhD in the School of Engineering and Physical
Sciences. He served as the Deputy Director at the Centre for Ocean Energy Research (COER), Maynooth University, Ireland, working on nonlinear hydrodynamic modelling and control of wave
energy converters and the development of Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) based Numerical Wave Tanks. After this, he relocated to the Dept of Fluid Mechanics at Budapest University of
Technology and Economics, as a Research Fellow supported by an EU grant for the project Nonlinear Rock and Roll – Modelling and Control of Parametric Resonance in Wave Energy Converters, after which he worked as an Assistant Professor teaching Fluid Mechanics and CFD. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics, working on a project “High Fidelity Simulatitons and Deep Learning for Offshore Wind”.

Aerodynamic shape optimization is a complex task due to thehigh dimensionality of theproblem, the associated non-linearity and its large computational cost. These threeaspects have an impact on the overall time of the optimization routine. For this reason, emerging methods are being developed to accelerate the design process. They include advanced geometry parameterizations, low order modeling (e.g. Kriging interpolation or neural networks), dimensionality reduction and multi-fidelity techniques. The proposed activities for this scholarship will cover the main mathematical aspects of these methods and worked examples for aeronautical applications.

The activity consists of four presentations that address the following topics:

1) “Introduction” (1h)

– Motivation
– Focus
– Challenges
– Opportunities & direction

2) “Failure modes and condition monitoring” (1h)

– Components in power electronic systems
– Failure modes of power electronic switches
– Condition monitoring

3) “Converter reliability” (1h)

– Components to systems
– Reliability block diagram
– Mission profile based component stresses

4) “MMC reliability” (1h)

– Block diagram of MMC
– Reliability of MMC
– Impact of redundancy

Lectures’ timetable:
April 18 (15h00 to 17h00) Lect. 1 & 2
April 18 (17h30 to 19h30) Lect. 3 & 4

The lecture starts with an introduction to wave energy in the context of climate change imperatives and energy transition. The wave energy resource in the UK will be discussed alongside the system benefits of wave energy. A description of wave energy converter (WEC) classification by working principle and orientation will be introduced and a review of WEC progress by classification type, together with challenges and lessons learnt. A review and analysis of WEC scalability for the main categories of WEC will then be given, exploring theoretical limits and practical achievements. This is followed by a discussion of innovative flexible WECs and an example of current research investigating an origami inspired WEC.

Lecture timetable: May 28 (15h00 to 16h30)

The lecture starts with an introduction to floating offshore wind (FLOW), the context of FLOW within renewable energy and an assessment of current capacity and the global projections of FLOW capacity. Floating platform categories are then introduced and their stability approaches described. A discussion is given of the evolution and development of floating platform concepts and their stages of progress from laboratory to demonstration to commercialisation. This includes analysis of the design drivers for FLOW and how these have changed since early designs, together with some reflections on likely future developments.

Lecture timetable: May 28 (17h00 to 18h00)

The presentation aims to derive the balances of mass, linear momentum, angular momentum and energy for Fluid Mechanics in a simple form. Applications to renewable energy cases are described to give a deep insight into the physics involved.

Lecture timetable: June 17 (16h00 to 18h30)

This presentation explains how dimensional analysis can be used to model and understand engineering problems related to renewable energy. Topics covered include dimensional analysis, the Buckingham theorem and the Navier-Stokes equations. Froude scaling will be demonstrated from a physical point of view, a perspective not usually found in books and research papers. Some examples will be discussed during the lecture.

Lecture timetable: June 18 (08h30 to 11h00)

Within an industrial design environment, the ability to rapidly iterate through engineering designs is required to ensure innovation and competitiveness. For this reason, low order methods are typically used in the preliminary design phase. In this respect, they should fulfil the conflicting requirements of quick evaluations, high accuracy, and sufficient coverage of the design space. To meet these requirements emerging approaches that include multi-fidelity methods, dimensionality reduction techniques or advanced surrogate modelling are being considered. Over the last years, data-driven methods have been developed for aerodynamic design. They have been successfully demonstrated for a wide range of applications such as geometric design space definition, prediction of regression or classification aerodynamic metrics, flow-field modelling, and surrogate-based optimization.
Within this lecture, the following themes will be covered:
– Deployment of machine learning for geometry parametrisations.
– Summary of numerical methods to predict objective functions with numerical simulations (CFD) or low order models (e.g. neural networks).
– Overview of optimisation methods.
– Application of all described techniques to a real-world problem

In the second lecture, having introduced the main concepts for fast aerodynamic design and optimisation, this lecture will provide more advanced techniques that can be applied for complex engineering problems. In particular, it will be discussed:
– Dimensionality reduction for aerodynamic design by using a range of approaches that include the active subspace technique and neural networks
– Multi-fidelity methods, e.g. co-kriging
– Flow-field prediction methods for digital design processes
– Application of all described techniques to a real-world problem

Lectures’ timetable:

June 18 (11h30 to 14h00) Lect. 1
June 19 (08h30 to 11h00) Lect. 2

This 2-hoour lecture has two distinct parts: 1) general principles and tools for the modelling of water waves and 2) the physics and modelling of extreme waves.
The first part gives a brief overview of the various areas of application of numerical modelling of water waves and present the different tools that can be used in each case. From climate and meteorological applications at large spatial and time scales, down to wave-structure interactions with high accuracy models, the applicability and limitations of the tools will be discussed. Attention is given to the principles of designing Numerical Wave Tanks in Computation Fluid Dynamics CFD models.
The second part of the lecture gives an introduction to extreme ocean waves. From sailors’ tales to measured giant waves, it discusses how these waves caught the attention of the scientific community and became an active area of research for the designing of offshore structures. Different generation mechanisms for extreme waves are presented and the lecture concludes with a practical way to model extreme waves in CFD using focusing methodologies stemming from the NewWave theory.

Lecture timetable: June 18 (15h30 to 18h00)

This 2-hour lecture is structured as follows:
At first, it presents the main EU and international policies related to climate and energy, and how these link with the offshore energy strategy. Starting from the current projections of emissions and global warming based on IPCC reports, and moving to the necessity for climate adaptation and mitigation, it discusses the key role of the marine energy sector. The path to climate neutrality for Europe is also discussed together with the just transition, the challenges, and the financing mechanisms needed to reach the ambitious targets for renewable energy and emission reductions until 2030 and 2050.
The second part of the lecture focuses on career paths for engineers. One of the biggest challenges in the development of green economy is the ‘skills gap’. Highly qualified engineers and scientists with interdisciplinary experience and transferable skills are needed to fill the gaps of the present and meet the challenges of the future at all areas from construction, to research and from education to policy making and administration. The lecture includes a workshop where participants can ask for advice and discuss their career paths, sharing experience with the lecturer in the transitioning between sectors and roles, together with advantages and potential setbacks. Career options are discussed with tips for where to find vacancies for PhD positions and how to apply for relevant EU institutions and international organisations.

Lectures’ timetable:

June 19 (11h30 to 14h00) Lect. 2

The contribution will be based on four different sessions around the design and development of offshore renewable farms with particular focus on floating wind:

– The first session will be discussing the “Project development for offshore wind farms” and will introduce to the students the process to conceive, design, and develop an offshore wind farm from the bid to the commissioning phase, including consideration on consenting application aspects, grid connection requirements, and commercial and regulatory mechanisms. This session may include a small exercise on analysing the best wind farm layout from different perspectives.
– The second session will discuss “Floating structures concepts and classification”, with an overview of the existing technologies for floating wind and wave energy and a consideration on the classification criteria that can be applied for their selection and definition, with a view into SSE internal processes.
– The third session will be “Hydrodynamics and modelling aspects” and will review the hydrodynamic principles of floating structures for offshore renewable installations, with specific reference to floating wind technologies, and will consider the existing modelling techniques, tools, and software used by designers and developers for the assessment of their performance, including the coupling with Wind Turbine Generators (WTGs).
– The final session will analyse the components and techmologies required for the station-keeping and energy transmission. The proposed title is “Moorings system, Dynamic Cables and Marine Operations”. This session will discuss the mooring systems and dynamic cables applied in the floating wind industry, the components and the existing supply chain, and the associated marine operations for their installation.

Lectures’ timetable:

June 19 (15h30 to 18h00) Lect. 1
June 20 (08h30 to 11h00) Lect. 2

The goal of the lectures is to teach students about the development and optimisation of marine renewable energy devices at low to mid Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) using computational models. Demonstrating the advantages of early-stage Numerical Wave Tank experimentation to increase the Technology Performance Level (TPL) of devices before investing in expensive physical prototyping, tank and ocean testing, and then later-stage Numerical Wave Tank simulations to supplement the physical testing campaigns.
The Lecture Course will encompass topics such as :
1. The role of Numerical Wave Tanks in marine renewable energy device development
2. Hydrodynamic modelling
3. Mooring, PTO and Control systems
4. Numerical Wave Tank experiments

Lectures’ timetable:

June 20 (11h30 to 14h00) Lect. 1
June 20 (15h30 to 18h00) Lect. 2