Name
Rohan McElroy
Job title
Principal Structural Engineer
Organisation
icubed
Speaker biography
Rohan, an icubed consulting partner since 2017, leads the structural team, managing diverse projects across residential, commercial, industrial, infrastructure, renewables, energy, and building sectors in Australia, New Zealand, and internationally. His expertise spans wind-turbine foundations, transmission lines, substation facilities, rocket launch sites, tank farms, warehouses, bridges, water projects, and FRP structures in Aus, UK, USA, Canada, NZ, UAE, and Egypt. Rohan has presented research on lightweight FRP bridges at Amsterdam's Composites in Construction conference and co-authored papers for the International Federation for Structural Concrete and International Public Works Conference on composite FRP and geo-polymer concrete wharves and FRP decking installation.
Speaking At
Presentation title
Structural and Construction Efficiencies of the HumeBase Precast Wind Turbine Footing System
Presentation summary
As wind turbine capacities grow, foundation systems must withstand increasingly large structural demands. Larger rotor diameters and higher hub heights produce greater overturning loads, driving increase in both the size and complexity of wind turbine footings. While piled or rock-anchored solutions remain technically feasible, the geotechnical and logistical realities of many Australian wind farm sites often render these alternatives impractical or uneconomical. Most projects today use the conventional mass gravity concrete footing, with upwards of 900 cubic meters of concrete and 135 tonnes of steel reinforcement per turbine. Recognising the associated challenges, Humes and icubed consulting have developed an innovative precast hybrid footing system specifically tailored for utility-scale wind turbines. This paper presents the resulting HumeBase precast foundation solution and provides a detailed comparison to conventional cast in-situ footings, examining structural performance, constructability, logistics, sustainability outcomes, and cost implications. For equivalent loading and geotechnical conditions, project assessments indicate that the precast hybrid solution can achieve reductions in both concrete volume and steel reinforcement, delivering meaningful decreases in embodied carbon while improving construction efficiency and reliability. The presentation will outline structural geometry, design constraints, and engineering principles underpinning the HumeBase system, using comparative case-study data from an example wind farm. It will also describe the casting methodology, transport strategy, and construction methodology. In particular, the presentation highlights the modular design, enabled by interchangeable mould inserts, which reduces project-specific variability and enhances quality control, repeatability, and safety across sites.
