Dr. David Igoe

In order to achieve the greenhouse gas emissions targets set out in the Paris agreement, Ireland will need to significantly decarbonise its energy supply. Due to reducing costs, offshore wind now offers the most viable means for large scale decarbonisation of Irelands electricity supply by 2030. The new program for government 2020 has targeted 5GW of offshore wind capacity to be installed by 2030 at an estimated cost of more than €10 billion. At the end of 2019 there was 22 GW of offshore wind installed in Europe, mainly in areas near shore with favourable shallow water conditions. The foundations of an offshore wind turbine can represent up to 25% of the overall cost of development and more than 90% of offshore wind turbines installed to date are fixed to the seabed using steel piled foundations. This project aims to investigate pile ageing effects, one of the key challenges facing offshore foundation designers. This will be achieved through a combination of novel field and laboratory testing, and will lead to significant advances in scientific knowledge in Geotechnical Engineering and improvements in the design efficiency of Offshore Renewables.

The impact of flooding in Europe has increased over the past 50 years, which is directly attributed to climate change. Due to its geographical position and features, Ireland is especially vulnerable to extreme flooding caused by global warming. The probability of occurrence of these extreme events is increasing and climate disruption will add to the magnitude of such events. Across Britain and Ireland, the magnitudes have been increasing at a rate of approximately five per cent per decade since the 1960s. Flood defence infrastructure built during the 1960s in Ireland is no longer sufficiently resilient to withstand the magnitude of flooding now predicted for vulnerable areas. As a result, there is an urgent need for identifying upgrades for existing flood defence infrastructure in addition to the development of new infrastructure. Typically flood defence infrastructure consist of primarily earth embankments, cuttings, dams, dykes and retaining walls, which are underpinned by Geotechnical Engineering (the branch of civil engineering concerned with the engineering behaviour of earth materials, i.e. soils and rock). Increases in the intensity of rainfall events in recent years have led to a rise in the number of slope failures, and many areas benefitting from flood defence infrastructure are at risk from climate change induced flooding. It is therefore essential to efficiently indentify and allocate resources to the infrastructure which are at highest risk of failure. The proposed research aims to back-analyse industry geotechnical data to better understand the design efficiency, safety and resilience of our flood defence infrastructure in the face of climate change. In order to determine the appropriate risk-reduction measures and cost-effectiveness, the project aims to develop a risk framework to quantify the costs of climate change impact and will include the development of a decision support tool for upgrading and maintenance of Ireland's flood defence infrastructure.