Internship

Restoring North Sea biodiversity by redesigning scour protection to create safe shelter for marine life

Wind farms are no-fishing areas due to the underwater structures. Those structures that are used as scour protection, can create a very suitable place for reviving the marine creatures. The scouring problem happens where (granular) bed material is removed by the hydrodynamic forces around the turbines’ monopile foundation.

The most common strategy to date to prevent damage caused by scouring is to place stones on the seabed around these foundations, our goal is to design an optimal structure for biodiversity enhancement around monopiles that can also contribute as scour protection.

Stones or other under water added structures can be a good shelter for marine life, within a cooperation with Wageningen university biologist, we are trying to find a new, cost-effective, and easy-to-apply protection method for scouring to enhance the biodiversity considerably.

Advanced Tower System B.V. works on a dedicated design, to add some biofriendly elements to the scour protection.

The main topics of this internship

  1. Optimize the elements to be biofriendly as well as technical efficiency .
  2. Search about drag coefficient of elements.
  3. Preparation of some simple tests on stability of elements.
  4. Research about stability, settling velocity and impact strength of elements.
  5. Simulation of drop test or drag forces.
  6. Search about moulding procedure.

Your Profile

  • Mechanical engineering (preferably fluids) or design engineer student.
  • Familiar with SolidWorks
  • Familiar with other FEM software is a plus

Project Details

Work will be carried out with collaboration of Advanced Tower Systems B.V. in Enschede.​

For more details and general info please contact to vacancy@mecal.nl.