Renewable power is one of the main drives to achieve carbon reduction and net-zero, and to meet the ambitious climate goals. In particular, offshore wind power in Europe has been developing at a rapid pace in recent years. Multi-Giga watts offshore wind farms with larger wind turbine power ratings, floating wind turbines installed in deeper water areas, and higher ratio of renewables integrated to existing power grids, are fundamentally changing power system operations and bringing new challenges and technical demands. This industry-doctorate consortium, ADOreD, will recruit and train 15 Researchers by collaborating with 19 academic and industrial organisations. It aims to tackle the academic and technical challenges in the areas of transmission of offshore wind power to the AC grid by using power electronics-based AC/DC technologies. In doing so, it will equip the Researchers, through their PhD studies, with essential knowledge and skills to face fast energy transition in their future careers. The project covers 3 key research aspects: offshore wind (including wind turbines, wind power collection, and wind farm design and control); DC technologies (including AC/DC converters, HVDC control and DC network operation and protection); and AC grid (including stability and control of AC grids dominated with converters under various control modes. The ADOreD consortium has excellent coverage of academic universities and industry organisations including manufacturers, energy utilities, system operators, consultancy and technology innovation centres. All the research questions in the project reflect industry needs; academic novelty and innovation will be reflected in the methodologies and solutions; and the research results will be disseminated directly to the industry partners’ products, grid operation and services. The outcomes of the project are both technologies and a talent pool to accelerate the deployment and grid integration of large-scale offshore wind power.

Our aim is to develop innovative variational methods to address the challenges today in structural mechanics in the domain of the couplings and interactions between phenomena such as the plasticity, the frictional contact, the fracture mechanics, the damage and the dynamics. Challenge 1: the consideration in the functional of the non associative constitutive laws of which the most known are the unilateral contact with Coulomb's friction and numerous laws of geomaterials. Chalenge 2: the construction of variational approaches to simulate the structure evolution when dissipation is present in ways other than using classical step-by-step or incremental approaches, to control globally the computation of the overall loading history. Our ambition is to face simultaneously these two challenges. The non associative laws cannot be represented by a convex potential. In contrast, we showed that they can be modeled thanks to a bipotential, a function of 2 dual variables, biconvex. The bipotential approach leads to an extensive generalization of the calculus of variation. The Brezis-Ekeland-Nayroles principle is a non-incremental space-time variational principle. We extended it to the dynamics by introducing the concept of symplectic subdifferential. The proposed approach consists in extending this principle to the materials with bipotential. The goal is to develop the corresponding tools of numerical simulation. The target applications are the analysis of interactions such as the cyclic plasticity of metals, the plasticity of polycrystals and geomaterials and the extension of cracks compressed of which the tips rub together. Structuration: Axis 1: Mathematical and numerical tools Axis 2: Modelling and numerical simulation in non associative plasticity Axis 3: Damage and quasi brittle fracture in dynamical condition