An interview with the 2025 Tom Barton Award winner

Kathy Ziwei Wen, a geotechnical project engineer from Geotechnologies Intelligence (GeoIntel), has won the 2025 Tom Barton Award for her work to address significant errors in concrete use on an offshore wind turbine installation project.

The Tom Barton award honours GIRI’s founding director and recognises the efforts of individuals and project teams in the engineering and construction sectors who have demonstrated innovation, commitment, and excellence in eliminating error and improving productivity, quality, and sustainability. 

Kathy led a cross-disciplinary team in the development of a Bayesian ordinal regression model to estimate grout overconsumption risk at specific pile locations on an offshore wind turbine installation project that GeoIntel was called in to advise on. The model Kathy developed to resolve errors in the concrete calculation process not only optimised sequencing and planning on the project but also reduced costly delays and CO2 emissions.

Kathy explained that the piles were being installed as steel foundations in rock. “The contractor had been calculating the volume of concrete required at each pile location as the hollow volume of the steel cylinder. However, they realised that they were pumping in more concrete than the volume, and they didn’t know why, which is when they called in GeoIntel.”

In fact, in some cases, the concrete required was up to 200% more than the volume of the hollow cylinder, leading to delays, idle vessel time, and increased costs and environmental impact.

To understand the cause of the issue, and to develop a more precise calculation method, Kathy and her team reviewed the data from the geotechnical survey that had been conducted prior to the start of the installation process. This included data from the geological log collected by digging exploratory holes at each location. “We also looked at recovery – the amount of rock collected during this initial investigation – as this gives an indication of the level of fracturing in the rock that could have been causing the concrete loss.”

Kathy explains that these geological logs, together with the rock recovery data for each location, were used to give the fracturing at each site a score from one to five. “Using this data and the fracturing score, we developed a Bayesian general regression model to correlate these two parameters to the already installed piles. This gave us a relationship between the two parameters and the amount of concrete lost that we could use to estimate the concrete required for the remaining sites.”

Applied to the 28 remaining pile locations, the model identified 10 high-risk locations, allowing for targeted preparation of grout and equipment. 

“The ability to more accurately predict grout consumption meant that the contractor could sequence more effectively and plan better by bringing the right among of concrete for each installation, reducing delays by several weeks,” says Kathy. 

Her work also saved several million Euros by reducing all the associated expenses caused by programme delays, including time penalties and the costs of additional vessel movements, personnel, materials and equipment, and logistical and coordination overheads. Minimising vessel operations through better planning also reduced the project’s CO2 emissions by an estimated 500-1,000 tonnes.

“Kathy’s innovative integration of geotechnical expertise and statistical modelling has set a new benchmark for addressing complex challenges in offshore construction,” says Amin Rismanchian from GeoIntel, who nominated Kathy for the award. “Her work not only reduced inefficiencies and environmental impact on this project but also provides a transferable solution that will elevate the industry standard for future projects.”

Finding out she had won was “surprising and overwhelming,” says Kathy and a welcome validation of her work. “Often in this industry, you don’t know whether what you’ve done has really made an impact, so to have my work recognised in this way is very meaningful.”

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