Senior Engineer, Wind Turbine Loads for Offshore Foundation Design

Senior Engineer, Wind Turbine Loads for Offshore Foundation Design

Wood Thilsted is a consulting engineering company specialised in geotechnical and structural engineering within the offshore renewable energy industry.  We have been consistently successful attracting the most competent and experienced design specialists, passionate to work in the global wind industry.  We operate globally, supporting projects located in Asia, North America and Northern Europe.  We currently employ a staff of over 100, most based in UK or Denmark but also from offices in Taiwan, Japan and US with a continued growth foreseen in the near future.

As a company, WT strives for technical excellence and to provide the best overall value to our clients’ projects.  We also aim to have a strong culture based on mutual trust, honesty, knowledge sharing and a good social atmosphere.  Due to the success and growth of the company, we are searching for an ambitious Senior Engineer to develop Wood Thilsted’s expanding capacity to integrate aeroelastic simulations and loads within the design process.

We have a number of large detailed design projects in offshore wind, as well as a continuous stream of concept and FEED studies, plus design work on several innovative concepts (outside of the currently accepted foundation concepts for offshore wind) including floating structures.  

The primary work location can be one of or offices in Århus, Vejle, Copenhagen, London or Bristol. However, given our teams, clients and projects are spread internationally across Northern Europe, North America and East Asia, you may expect some travelling in relation to your work, both nationally and internationally. In addition, there may be opportunities during your employment for long-term or short-term postings abroad.

Areas of responsibility: As a Senior Engineer for the wind turbine loads team, your main responsibilities will be to ensure turbine models are sufficiently accurate to deliver the design objectives for substructures (concept, FEED, detailed, secondary steel).  Typically the important tasks will include early verification of the validity of the model, through various checking strategies, ensuring convergence of loads with expected values, expanding and improving WT loads database and scaling tools, automating data exchanges between analysis tools and report-generation software.  In this role, you will ensure the technical description of relevant aspect of the project are clear, that interfaces and responsibilities are defined, that tasks are completed and checked and that engagement with the client is sufficient that value is added to the wind farm project.  In particular, this will require a well-managed project initiation kick-off technical meeting, periodic consultation between stakeholders and final reporting and discussion of the results and conclusions.

In your role, you will be a technical specialist, playing a key role in liaison between WT colleagues and our clients.  Important will be to discern when to lead the client and when to be lead on technical topics.  You will have an understanding the practicalities of the commercial and physical processes.  Primarily you will be the point of contact within the WT team on considerations relating to the turbine.  These will include selecting, improving, scaling or building from scratch aeroelastic wind turbine models, running simulations and checking loads are within the design envelope (whether or not the machine has been certified).  Vital to these processes will be for you to confirm that appropriate assumptions have been made about choices of model techniques and input parameters, appropriate selection of design load case simulations to represent operational status throughout the design life, but with a focus on the design of the support structure.  This is typically outside the scope or experience of the wind turbine design team but firmly at the centre of Wood Thilsted’s expertise.  Structures are designed for a specific site and appropriate decisions are made about clustering to reduce analysis effort whilst ensuring efficient use of materials and durability, throughout the operational life.  You will have a working knowledge of aspects of wind farm design, construction, installation, transport, commissioning, operation, financing and end of life aspects to understand the role of the load simulations in reducing the lifetime costs  and embodied energy.  You may have particular experience or analysis skills in relevant areas such as blades, control systems, drivetrains, machinery structures, towers, transition pieces, secondary steel, floating platforms or mooring systems.

There will be opportunities for you to train or mentor others in your team, particulary student interns (bachelors, masters, postgraduates) and recent graduates.  You will be able to perform quality checks and make sure the work lives up to WTs standard.

Your background: Your experience simulating wind turbine operational life spans 5-10 years.  You are familiar with building numerical models of conceptual and existing machines, developing tables of representative load cases, from characterisations of wind farm sites, in compliance with industry best practice and the requirements of the IEC 61400 series of standards.  You understand the importance of integrated WTG analysis to the design process for offshore wind farm primary structures, for example with regards design of cost/ carbon/ weight optimisation, prototype testing, model validation, certification and through-life estimates of remaining operational life.  You should preferably hold a masters degree in aeronautical, control, structural, mechanical engineering, or as a naval architect.  You have experience, flair and an interest in planying a key technical role in the team and building new capabilities.

It is essential that you:

• Have experience building wind turbine aeroelastic models in standard software such as HAWC2, Bladed, FLEX, VTS, FAST, ASHES, Deeplines Wind, Orcaflex or similar – you may have written parts of your own simulation code or modified opensource code,
• You should be comfortable programming in one or more languages as way to automate or improve efficiency, accuracy or speed of repetitive engineering tasks (MATLAB, Python, VBA, html, FORTRAN, Pascal, C, C#)
• Are happy to work unsupervised, to take the initiative, to make appropriate assumptions, to check your work and that of others, to suggest improvements, to contribute positive to the team you work in, a technical specialist with excellent communication skills.
• Are experienced working in the offshore wind industry (ideally for a WTG or structures designer, developer or operator)
• Are fluent in English and able to communicate effectively with colleagues, clients, consultants and contractors through a variety of media, including written reports, presentations, web-based telecommunication and face-to-face meetings;
• Confidence in a second language would also be an advantage;
• Are pro-active in your efforts to engage with others;
• Demonstrate a strong drive to fulfil your assignments, and a willingness to take the initiative when faced with opportunities to exceed expectations;
• Possess excellent numeracy, literacy, communication and interpersonal skills;
• Are competent writing technical reports (at WT processes are automated using LaTeX), fluent in the use of standard office software such as MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams;

Furthermore, it is advantageous if you have experience of another key aspect the wind farm life cycle, such as the following:

• design and analysis of blades, control systems, drivetrain components, machinery structures, towers, transition pieces, foundations, piles, secondary steel, floating platforms or mooring systems;
• through-life management of wind farms, digital twins, reliability-centred maintenance, FMECA, machine learning, SCADA analysis, wind turbine health assessments, end-of-life assessments, monitoring, remote diagnostics, economic context of wind farm management strategies.

In return we offer competitive remuneration, exciting career development prospects, the opportunity to work on interesting projects and an approach to all employees, which is inclusive, empowering, flexible and human-centred.  Nobody suitably competent will be prohited from joining our team.

Apply: Please apply using the link where you will have the opportunity to upload a CV and enter your details for consideration.

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