Articles and Videos
Insight from Empire’s engineering team. We’ll update the page regularly and we’d be happy to talk if you’d like to know more about a given topic.
Floating Offshore Wind is Here to Stay
By Aaron Zigeng Du and Eric Paya. Floating Wind Goes Mainstream Floating offshore wind (FOW), considered as a niche technology by some, is no longer confined to R&D. It has gradually reached a high ‘technology readiness level’, making it a natural complement to...
Why is Structural Integrity Management important for Floating Offshore Wind?
By Aaron Zigeng Du. Floating offshore wind Floating offshore wind is a leading technology in the renewable energy sector. Since the world’s first commercial floating offshore wind farm Hywind Scotland with a capacity of 30 MW was commissioned in October 2017,...
ENGINEERING WAR STORIES Diversity in offshore wind. Bringing together a diverse team and working together for offshore wind project success
By Aaron Zigeng Du. As one of the fastest growing renewable power sources, offshore wind industry embraces cutting-edge technologies, such as Big Data, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain, to improve the efficiency of power...
Looking forward to Foundation Ex 2020
By Karl Davis. Foundation Ex was the very first offshore engineering conference in Bristol. It was founded after attending countless events where I always felt that something was missing – I never felt inspired to come back with the ideas and inspiration.I wanted to solve this problem.
Empire Engineering London office is open for business
We are delighted to announce the launch of our London Office at our new Blackfriars location, alongside the addition of our new Head of London Office, Aaron Zigeng Du. Aaron Zigeng Du, Head of London office "I'm looking forward to working with Empire's London based...
All the sessions from Foundation Ex
Our speakers from Foundation Ex 2019 have kindly allowed us to share the slides from their sessions. Here they are for you to download.
Foundation Ex offshore engineering conference: Event report
The dust has now settled after the inaugural Foundation Ex conference. Myself and all at Empire Engineering would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who was involved.
Foundation Ex: why it’s not just another conference…
Foundation Ex is an event for technical teams, by a technical team. Taking place on 1st October in Bristol, Foundation Ex will bring together experts from across the world in a series of dynamic keynote talks and workshops, sharing knowledge on cutting edge technical innovation in offshore wind turbine foundations.
ENGINEERING WAR STORIES Turning an offshore structural failure into a repair success
Cracks in Primary Structure Offshore can be stress inducing… This is the story of how we helped our Client from first identifying the failure, through the process of Root Cause Analysis, to enacting a safe repair.
Pitfalls of the Wind Turbine-Foundation Integrated Load Analysis process (and how to avoid them)
A discussion of the pitfalls of the Integrated Load Analysis process for offshore wind turbine foundations, and how these can be avoided.
How Deep can the Monopile go in Offshore Wind?
Yesterday I came across an excellent article written by Cameron Dunn from Arup titled “Windfarms: has the death of the monopile been greatly exaggerated?”. It got me thinking about the journey the humble monopile has taken, and more importantly how far do we think it can go…
Breaking Waves in Offshore Wind
By Dr Alan Marson. I’m not really a beach person, but beach trips have become an essential part of my kids' Summer holidays; although being Scottish, I think it’s the novelty of warm water they enjoy the most. When I’m there, I do love watching the waves break on the...
And the winners of a Lego Vestas Wind Turbine are…
Just over a week ago, the team here at Empire Engineering put out a post on LinkedIn giving away sets of Lego’s awesome new Vestas Wind turbine. We hoped we’d get one or two comments, gain a few likes. What we actually received was really quite stunning with more than...
The Importance of Full Life Cycle Design
It’s not always easy, in the excitement of planning, procuring and constructing your project, to keep an eye fixed on all of the practical considerations. Whether its an impulse buy of a sofa on sale, that when you get home doesn’t fit through the front door.
Why Strong Decision Making is the Key to Success in an Offshore Wind Project
Offshore wind projects are all different. Different turbines, different seabed and metocean conditions, different contracting strategies. But they all have one thing in common, uncompromising timelines driven by rigid power purchase agreement requirements.
