Dr Katherine Kwa - University of Southampton

Research Fellowships 2022

Katherine Kwa is working on improving station-keeping systems for floating offshore renewable energy infrastructure. Station-keeping includes mooring line and anchor components which tie floating structures to the seafloor. Floating offshore technology unlocks the necessary ocean space far from shore, for harvesting sufficient clean wind, wave, and tidal energy to meet society’s growing electricity demand, achieve the transition to net zero and tackle the climate crisis.

Efficient and reliable station-keeping systems are critical to drive down the project cost of floating renewable energy infrastructure to enable upscaling of the infrastructure development. However, there is currently a disconnect in the design process between the anchor analysis and mooring–floater components. Current design methodologies treat the mooring line to seafloor connection as a fixed pinned connection and so the anchor and surrounding seabed response is not considered. This can result in overly conservative and expensive designs because beneficial coupling effects between the anchor–mooring–floater components are overlooked. Dr Kwa aims to integrate ‘hidden’ system benefits from coupling seabed–anchor effects with the mooring–floater response to unlock full-system station-keeping design efficiencies.

Personal website:

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/5xvtng/doctor-katherine-kwa

https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherine-kwa-5678386a/?originalSubdomain=uk

https://twitter.com/KatherineKwa