THE CLIENT: Prospect
THE BACKGROUND: Prospect is an Aberdeen-based company which provides integrated, multidisciplinary engineering design and analysis consultancy services to clients worldwide. It is a global division of the Hallin Group. An essential part of designing a turbine is an assessment of the combined wind loading plus wave loading on the structure. EPCC and Prospect are evaluating the benefits of using parallel computing to carry out numerical simulation of the behaviour of offshore wind turbines.
THE SOLUTION: EPCC is using its own parallel computing systems to run the ABAQUS and Star CCM+ analysis packages to simulate the behaviour of offshore wind turbines.
THE KEY CLIENT BENEFITS: Prospect foresees a factor of 20 return on the investment in the project, as a result of this technology. Additional income potential will be possible through more rapid job turnaround and new capability to tackle jobs an order of magnitude beyond Prospect’s current limits. Further, there are many other applications of the technology within the energy industry that can be explored and marketed.
SUPA EXPERTISE: EPCC is a leading European centre of expertise in advanced research, technology transfer and the provision of supercomputer services. EPCC hosts the world-class HECToR system, a 200 TFLOP Cray XT5 supercomputer, and specialises in applying HPC to industry and academia. For more information visit www.epcc.ed.ac.uk.
THE COLLABORATION MECHANISM: Contract research.