Founders’ Honors

As the core design unit for the Putian Pinghai Bay Offshore Wind Farm project, POWERCHINA Fujian Electric Power Survey and Design Institute was responsible for designing 28 jacket foundations, though repetitive engineering tasks posed a significant delivery constraint. To overcome slow modeling, lengthy optimization cycles, and repeated work across static, pile-soil, lifting, transportation, load-out, seismic, and fatigue cases, the team developed its own automatic optimization software. Because the workflow needed to support nearly every necessary offshore structural calculation, accelerating iteration while maintaining structural strength became a critical objective.

Built around SACS command streams and text-file interfaces, the optimization software batched multicase iterations and ran overnight without supervision. Average modeling time fell 85% to 89%, while optimization time fell 88% to 92%. Static calculations converged in more than 95% of cases. In an internal comparison with five engineers, automated results reduced the need for 380 metric tons of steel across four foundations while meeting structural strength requirements.