51.52°N 0.13°W — LONDON // UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
Digital Healthcare Engineering Originator·Marine & Offshore Digitalisation Systems·Lifecycle Asset Intelligence
I develop digitalisation systems for ageing ships and offshore structures, connecting real-time monitoring, digital twins, AI diagnostics, and predictive maintenance into a lifecycle framework for safer, smarter infrastructure.
Ch.01 — Origin
I wanted to build more than a thesis: a reusable framework for how ageing ships and offshore structures can be monitored, modelled, diagnosed, and maintained across their lifecycle.
I am a mechanical engineering PhD researcher at University College London and the originator of the Digital Healthcare Engineering framework: a modular approach to lifecycle digitalisation for ships and offshore structures. The framework reframes asset integrity from isolated, reactive inspection toward continuous, data-driven lifecycle intelligence.
First developed during my PhD, the framework now supports a wider research trajectory across the UCL Marine Safety and Digital Healthcare Engineering Group and international collaborators, involving 30+ researchers and more than fifteen related publications. My doctoral thesis applies the framework end to end to ageing monopile-type offshore wind turbines: from field sensing and digital-twin model updating to structural assessment and predictive maintenance.
Growing up in a coastal city, the sea was always part of my life, from being out on the water to my father's boats. That background, combined with a fascination for engineering and design, shaped the direction of my work: technically rigorous systems that can make ageing infrastructure safer, smarter, and more sustainable.
Ch.03 — Why It Matters
Ageing offshore wind turbines, ships, and marine structures face corrosion, fatigue, cracking, mechanical damage, and rising inspection costs. DHE turns fragmented inspection into continuous lifecycle intelligence, helping operators detect damage earlier, update digital twins, plan maintenance, reduce downtime, and manage structural risk.
Catch corrosion, cracking, and denting before they become critical failures.
Feed real field measurements into a continuously updated digital twin.
Schedule inspection and repair around actual condition, not fixed calendars.
Fewer surprise failures and better-timed interventions across the fleet.
Risk-based, predictive maintenance instead of reactive, expensive intervention.
Assess limit states under combined environmental and operational loading.
The work targets high-cost offshore infrastructure, where ageing, corrosion, fatigue, inspection planning, downtime, and extreme-weather risk create major operational and financial exposure, supporting asset-integrity decision support and predictive, risk-based inspection and maintenance.
Ch.04 — From Research to Field System
The framework is not just conceptual. My work connects field inspection, damage digitisation, model updating, structural simulation, and predictive maintenance into a practical digital-twin workflow for ageing offshore assets.
Ch.05 — Research Momentum
Since its early formulation in my 2021 work, DHE has expanded into a broader research landscape across multiple infrastructure domains, with a growing body of more than fifteen publications building on the original framework.
Lifecycle health management of marine and offshore assets: monitoring and digitalisation, AI and machine learning, physics-based modelling, diagnostics, predictive health analysis, and maintenance planning.
Published at ICSOS 2021 (Hamburg), establishing the integrated technical architecture that forms the foundation of maritime DHE.
Led the first full review and feasibility analysis, as first author, in Data-Centric Engineering (Cambridge University Press). The same year, Professor Jeom Kee Paik introduced the term "Digital Healthcare Engineering," naming the pre-existing framework and broadening it to include human well-being.
Applied and extended across monopile and jacket-type offshore wind turbines, containerships, subsea pipelines, land-based LNG tanks, FRP composite pipeline repairs, and human health, at UCL and collaborating institutions internationally.
The framework underpins the Marine Safety and Digital Healthcare Engineering Group at UCL, supported by more than fifteen publications building on the original work.
Ch.06 — The Record
Eight peer-reviewed outputs from the doctoral programme: three journal articles (one accepted for publication) and five international conference papers.
Journal articles
Abdulaziz Sindi, Hyeong Jin Kim, Young Jun Yang, Giles Thomas, Jeom Kee Paik
Abdulaziz Sindi, Hyeong Jin Kim, Igor A. Chaves, Jeom Kee Paik
Abdulaziz Sindi, Jeom Kee Paik
Conference papers
Abdulaziz Sindi, Giles Thomas, Jeom Kee Paik
Abdulaziz Sindi, Hyeong Jin Kim, Igor A. Chaves, Jeom Kee Paik
Abdulaziz Sindi, Fang Wang, Giles Thomas, Jeom Kee Paik
Abdulaziz Sindi, Jeom Kee Paik
Abdulaziz Sindi, Jeom Kee Paik
Invited peer reviewer: Ships and Offshore Structures (Taylor & Francis), since 2024.
Ch.07 — Signals
Awards & scholarships
Full scholarship via the Saudi Arabian Cultural Bureau, London, supporting the entire PhD programme at UCL.
Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia Cultural Bureau, London, for perseverance and initiative in developing the research. The programme was itself named a 2025 Distinguished Innovation Enabler.
Maritime-technology innovation feature recognising the Digital Healthcare Engineering work.
Business and product design category.
Invited talks & engagements
Invited to present the research to the Saudi Postdoc Association (forthcoming).
Presented doctoral research on the digitalisation and structural health of ships and offshore structures: TUHH, University of Rostock, UMT Malaysia, and UCL.
Invited by the UCL Saudi Society to present research to H.E. Abdullah Alswaha at UCL: maritime engineering, structural health, and the DHE framework.
ICSOS 2021 (Hamburg), 2023 (Yantai), 2024 (Chennai); SNAME Maritime Convention 2025 (Norfolk, Virginia).
Professional memberships
In the room
Appendix — Background
ANSYS · ABAQUS · LS-DYNA · OpenFOAM · nonlinear FEA · CFD · structural integrity & limit-state assessment
Digital-twin architecture · structural health monitoring · real-time & IoT sensing · ultrasonic NDT · predictive health analysis
MATLAB · Python · Java · LabVIEW · machine-learning & data-driven modelling
SolidWorks · Siemens NX · AutoCAD · 3D printing · wave tanks · wind tunnels
Thesis: Digital Healthcare Engineering for Ageing Monopile-Type Offshore Wind Turbines. Supervisor: Prof. Jeom Kee Paik. Passed viva voce with minor corrections (2026).
Industry collaboration with Quattro Plant: digital-twin Health & Usage Monitoring System with a multilayer-perceptron neural network for predictive fault, leak, and theft detection on a railroad vehicle, with a commercial business-plan component.
Experimental study of compressive loading on glass-fibre-reinforced polymers; led an industrial group project on city-vehicle aerodynamics with 3D-printed components.
Ch.08 — Contact
For research collaborations, industry partnerships, talks, or enquiries about lifecycle digitalisation and Digital Healthcare Engineering.
London, United Kingdom · UK ILR, no sponsorship required
abdulaziz.sindi@gmail.com