Richard Whitehouse

You’ve been at HR Wallingford since 1988. What has kept you here?

I was fortunate to start out in an area of work that interested me with a good balance of consultancy and research work. Plus, I like the mix of physical model experiments, desk studies, and computer and field work. This combination – plus working alongside very good colleagues and clients, and being able to publish papers – has kept me motivated.

What sort of projects have you worked on?

In the last 20 years, I’ve worked on projects investigating different ways of protecting wind turbine foundations from the impacts of being eroded by currents – scour. I’ve also been involved in looking into better routing and installation solutions for subsea cables, which transport the power to shore from wind farms.

I was heavily involved in setting up the Fast Flow Facility in 2014 because we needed a flume with big waves and currents and a deep sediment pit so that we could push the boundaries in scour and erosion testing. I was also project manager when we set the UK Coastal Research Facility, which allowed other academics to come here for their work. It’s now continuously in use in our Froude Hall as a large marine test facility.

What are the biggest challenges for offshore wind with regard to scour?

I think the biggest challenges at the moment relate to the mixed composition of the sediment at wind farm sites. A lot of the current methods for predicting scour offshore assume there is well defined sand, which is not the case. We need to be able to combine the actual soil parameters and to understand how this soil erodes based on the actual make-up rather than just some simplified parameterization of the composition, and also to include the time series of the wave and current fields.

Expert's perspectives: tackling scour at wind farms

Richard explains the process of scour; how foundations can be protected; and the importance of sediment samples.

Has a PhD been essential for your work?

Without a PhD I wouldn't have got the job at HR Wallingford because I wouldn't have had specialised knowledge of sediment transport. I’ve also needed it to co-supervise PhD students – seven since the 1990s.

Tell us more about supervising PhD students

At HR Wallingford, we can supervise PhD students as we are an Affiliated Research Centre (ARC) with the Open University – we can ask them to study difficult topics of commercial relevance that perhaps we don’t have enough hours to address ourselves. We learn from them, and attaining this highest of academic accreditations demonstrates that we are world class. 

We support researchers in other ways too: through links with other universities, by co-supervising studies and giving advice on pieces of work. I've also been external examiner for more than nine PhDs, eight of them outside the UK.

What do enjoy about writing journal papers?

I like pulling together different bits of information. When you're writing a paper, you can spend extra time going beyond the scope needed to meet a client's requirements, and add more interpretation and possibly data from other places. Or do a comparison between a computer model and field results. 

Once finished, you have a piece of work that is public, clearly visible, demonstrating knowledge and competence in a particular area, whereas client reports are not usually widely available.

What books have you written?

Scour at Marine Structures, and Dynamics of Estuarine Mud.

What do you enjoy doing outside work?

I enjoy walking, playing golf and the guitar. The whole publication peer review cycle takes up quite a lot of time too, but when I’m doing that I’m learning about others’ research before it actually appears in print, plus I enjoy helping others.