URI engineers have been at the forefront of providing regulators, industry, and others technological expertise for the construction, operation, and monitoring for the Block Island Wind Farm.
- Block Island Wind Farm Structural Monitoring - The goal of this study is to monitor the natural frequencies, damping characteristics, and deformations of the jacket structures currently in service at the Block Island Wind Farm. The information will be used to check design assumptions and inform future designs.
- Cyclic Axial Load Testing of Piles for Jacket Foundations - The goal is to investigate the behavior of pipe piles under axial cyclic loading considering the effects of time and large numbers of cycles. The information will be used to improve foundation design procedures for piled offshore wind jackets.
- Designing Port Infrastructure for Sea Level Change: A Survey of U.S. Engineers - This research gauges the U.S. port and marine infrastructure engineering community’s attitude and approach to planning for sea level change for maritime infrastructure projects.
- Fishing Status of Vessels Using the AIS: A Big Data and Machine Learning Approach - The overarching goal of this study is to generate improved maps of fishing effort and landings values at sea. A technical study is needed because established methods are known to contain substantial inaccuracies, and newer approaches have not been applied to species of interest in Southern New England’s offshore wind lease areas.
- Innovative Anchoring System for Offshore Wind - The goal of this study is to develop a cost-effective anchoring system for floating offshore wind turbine platforms.
- MARIne mammal Monitoring at Block Island using Acoustics (MARIMBA). - Development of a underwater acoustic detection system that will classify, track and display vocalizing whales near offshore wind facilities.
- Real-time Opportunity for Development of Environmental Observations (RODEO) - Collecting real-time measurements of the construction and operation activities at the Block Island Wind Farm for more accurate assessments of environmental effects and to inform mitigation measures.
- Rhode Island Ocean Special Area Management Plan (Ocean SAMP) Design of a Southern New England Offshore Wind Demonstration Site - Optimization of the wind farm siting and layout using optimization methods (micrositing optimization).