Reader Dr Adam Sadowski has long been fascinated by ‘shell structures’ (huge containment structures like silos or support structures such as monopiles and towers). Now an EPSRC Fellowship is enabling him to apply high performance computing to enhance the design of the next generation of ever taller offshore wind support towers.

There is an urgent need to scale up renewable energy generation, but with offshore wind towers now exceeding 120m in height and thousands of tonnes in weight, physical testing of these structures as a basis for design rule development has become impossible. To solve this challenge, Adam is developing ‘digital twins’: high-fidelity geometric representations simulated under different scenarios, based on high performance computing, to help identify the wind structure designs that will work best in the real world.

He explains: “For metal shells, the knowledge base underpinning structural design standards is quite old and small-scale, so if you’re designing something that’s massive – like a 120-m tall wind tower – you tend to be conservative, which means you use more material than you need.”

Adam’s research received a huge boost when he won a highly competitive Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Fellowship. The new project, which kicked off in January 2025, will see Imperial collaborating with a number of industrial and academic partners.

“One aim of the project is to create powerful open-source software tools that researchers can use to simulate the design of these structural systems. We want to democratise access to powerful structural simulation software,” says Adam. “As we face ever bigger design challenges, I think it’s important that we become more computationally minded in structural engineering so that we can work on ever larger engineering problems with confidence.”

“If my project is successful, we could save 5 to 10 per cent of the steel normally used per tower. Ultimately, I’m trying to make it cheaper and more attractive to develop renewable wind energy facilities.”