I'm Rory Morrison, a project engineer with interests in Digital Twins, Wind Energy, and Machine Learning.

I'm a project engineer with Xi Engineering Consultants, based in beautiful Edinburgh, Scotland. Previous to this, I completed a PhD at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Even longer ago, I worked as a Renewable Energy Engineer for Black and Veatch (2 years) and, before that, as a Mechanical Engineer in the Water industry at Ross-Shire Engineering (1 year).

The title of my PhD was Digital Twins for offshore wind turbines: physics-based model updating for improved operations and maintenance. This examined using Machine Learning to update physical models of floating wind turbine chains to predict their changing health. In this sense, I hoped to progress Wind Energy towards "true" Digital Twins.

My other main interest is the coding language Python. The projects on this website are largely Python-based.

This website contains a mixture of articles, mini Python projects, and blog posts.

Rory on successfully handing in his corrected PhD thesis, Glasgow, 2025.

Publications

See Google Scholar, or ORCID. In reverse order (very short list at the moment!):

  • Anomaly detection in wind turbine SCADA data for power curve cleaning, R Morrison, X Liu, Z Lin, Renewable Energy, 2021.
  • Ensemble offshore Wind Turbine Power Curve modelling – An integration of Isolation Forest, fast Radial Basis Function Neural Network, and metaheuristic algorithm, T Li, X Liu, Z Lin, R Morrison, Energy, 2021.
  • A Study of the Potential for Reuse of North Sea Oil and Gas Installations for Wind Turbines, R Morrison, 2017, Masters thesis, University of Strathclyde.

Highlights

Support a student, buy a mug!

If you want a cool mug (or two), and to support a student with a little bit of pocket money, consider buying a Wind Energy themed mug I designed.

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WESC2023 Presentation

the presentation I delivered for the Wind Energy Science Conference 2023

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Articles

How Heavy are Floating Wind Mooring Chain Links?

Here's a hypothetical scenario: The world's strongest man, Tom Stoltman, has to lift a single link of a floating wind mooring chain. Are you betting on Tom or the chain link?

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The Wonderful World of Floating Offshore Wind

Floating Offshore Wind (FOW) is still very much in its infancy. As such, we are at an interesting time where many different and sometimes wacky concepts are being floated (pun intended). In this article I will go through some of the less main-stream designs and concepts.

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What if a Wind Turbine Really was a Windmill?

Calling wind turbines "windmills" is a pet peeve of mine. All things considered it is a quite harmless mistake but it got me thinking.... How much flour would a modern WT produce if it was a WM? And how many WTs would it take to feed the UK?

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How Reinforcement Learning concepts can help us with our New Year goals

RL required the formalisation of lots of aspects of the learning experience humans take for granted. In this short article, I discuss one such aspect, the "Credit Assignment Problem" and how it can provide a useful lens for reviewing our own goals.

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Fine Wind Turbines, Clear Morning

Another woodblock print mashup. This time it was Fine Wind, Clear Morning, another work by Hokusai.

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The "Greatest Olympian" Fallacy: Why Metrics Matter

Why it's unfair to compare Olmpians from different sports by their medals won.

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Latest Blog Posts

#019 2023-07-25 | Went walkabouts with my partner. Some notes on how ridiculously overpacked we were, and what we'd change next time.

2023-06-12 | I went an entire day only speaking Spanish with my Spanish partner. Click here for the record of translated words along with an exercise to illustrate how difficult this task is.

2023-06-07 | I spoke at a conference for the first time. Some thoughts here.