Recently Laura Marimon Giovannetti, a final year PhD student in FSI currently completing a 10 month placement at Ben Ainslie Racing  attended the Sixth International Conference on Structural Engineering, Mechanics and Computation (SEMC 2016) in Cape Town, South Africa and reports below. We offer our congratulations to her on winning the best paper in the young researchers award category. She reports on some of the key parts of the conference.

The conference featured  360 papers with authors representing 60 countries from all five continents. With a great number of fields of structural mechanics and a large number of papers, the competition for the best paper in the Young Researchers Award (under 35) was hard, but I managed to bring the award home. I was presented to the opening ceremony as the winner of the prize and I had the possibility to present my research in the largest room! I was very pleased with the compliment received for my paper by the conference organizer Prof. A. Zingoni of the University of Cape Town. Following my presentation I had some interesting questions and all the people in the room were pleased with my work on passive adaptive composite foil design based on coupled FSI using StarCCM+ and based on our validation studies in the R.J.Mitchell wind tunnel using synchronised PIV and DIC.
The topics of the conference were very broad, from fluid-structure interaction to soil-structures interaction (for earthquake damage-prevention) to composites and sandwich materials. Within the three days of the conference we had six parallel sessions running all day.

Keynote speakers were Prof. Kim Rasmussen (University of Sydney, Australia), Prof. Adnan Ibrahimbegovic (Universite Technologie Compiegne, France), Prof. Klaus-Jürgen Bathe (MIT, USA), Prof. Amr Elnashai (Pennsylvania State University, USA), Prof. Jian-Fei Chen (Queen’s University of Belfast, UK) and Prof. Guido De Roeck (KU Leuven, Belgium). All the keynotes were focusing on different aspects of structural mechanics and the ones that I liked the most were the one from Prof. Jian-Fei Chen and the one from Prof. Amr Elnashai.
 

I have also met a large number of new people (from fellow PhD students to professors) and I had the opportunity to go with some new friends (PhD students at Ferrari) to visit Cape of Good Hope and the African penguins in Simon’s town.
 
I’d like to thank both the University of Southampton and Land Rover Ben Ainslie Racing for allowing me to attend this extremely interesting conference. I also would like to encourage people to travel to Cape Town, the city and its surroundings are beautiful and you can learn a lot about the history of the country visiting the Apartheid prison in Robben Island, where Mandela was held prisoner for 17 years.