As part of the NRC KPN grant “Bottom Fixed Offshore Wind Turbines in Extreme Waves” (B-WAVE), we have a 
vacancy for a 3-year PhD position at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering within the Marine 
Civil Engineering group. The ever-growing demand of offshore wind for a sustainable green energy supply 
requires increasing research on accurate and efficient evaluations of the sea states and the wave loads on the 
wind turbine substructures. In the B-WAVE project, the wave conditions and wave loads will be analysed 
through a numerical framework with extensive validations.

This specific PhD project focuses on met-ocean analysis, large-scale sea-state numerical analysis and wave 
load calculations on offshore wind substructures. A fully nonlinear potential flow framework will be used as a 
foundation for further developments and applications. More sophisticate breaking wave algorithms will be 
investigated, multiple marine environmental stressors will be included, and an automated multi-scale 
workflow based on modelling and large datasets will be developed and applied. For the interaction between 
wind and propagating waves, a non-hydrostatic wave model will employed.

The numerical models used for those activities reside within the open-source hydrodynamics framework 
REEF3D (www.reef3d.com). The model is developed in-house and the candidate will be a member of the 
research team. The new developments will be implemented in REEF3D and the numerical results will be 
validated extensively from previous experimental campaigns.