Luke Prendergast wins Best Paper in Geotechnics at CERI 2014
Thursday, 18 August, 2016
UCD student, Luke Prendergast, won the Best Student Paper award for Geotechnics Research at the Civil Engineering Research in Ireland (CERI) Conference, held in Queen’s University, Belfast on August 28th and 29th, 2014. His paper was entitled “The effect of scour on the dynamic response of an offshore wind turbine”. In his presentation, he evaluated the potential of using changes in the natural frequency of an offshore wind turbine as a means of detecting scour around the foundation. Scour is a big problem as it can undermine a foundation and can result in unexpected failures. It is also notoriously difficult to detect. Luke’s method uses accelerometers installed on top of the turbine and has the potential to be a much more cost effective solution to scour monitoring than anything else in existence today. Luke is studying for a PhD under the supervision of Dr Kenneth Gavin in UCD’s school of Civil, Structural & Environmental Engineering.
