Professor Stephen Turnock and Laura Marimon Giovannetti had a busy day on the 7th July talking about the University of Southampton’s experience in engineering excellence in performance sport.  Firstly in the afternoon at an event hosted by the Bishop Wordsworth school in Salisbury to an audience of 230 year 10 to year 12 students from four different school’s in the Salisbury area.  Then again in a slightly longer format to the IMechE’s Wessex Region as the 11th Annual Arnold Barks Christmas Lecture to an audience of over 100 .

The talk linked the long standing work at Southampton in performance sailing led for nearly five decades by the internationally renowned Wolfson Unit for Marine Technology and Industrial Aerodynamics now based in B185 adjacent to our new 138 m long towing tank, the work on developing F1 and Indy cars in the R.J.Mitchell wind tunnel from the late 70s as well as over a decade of collaboration with UKSport/EIS(R&I) supporting a wide range of sports.  The pursuit of performance that ensure that all athletes have the best possible equipment relies on a deep understanding of the physics of the problem coupled to possible engineering solutions. A common thread was the human aspects of the work where able PhD students work alongside sport scientists, coaches and athletes. To date PSEL has graduated 8 EngD/PhD students many of whom have an undergraduate Ship Science degree.

In a final section the relevance of the techniques and technologies developed  in performance sport to the wider world and in particular the necessity to find solutions to the essential challenge of improving the energy efficiency of global shipping which transports 90% of the worlds goods, emits 3% of CO2 in 100,000 ships. How will these ships be fuelled in a low carbon world?  An example of the cross-over is in Dr Angus Webb whose spin out company Dynamon offers services to the logistics industry.
For both talks the audience asked challenging questions and were in turn asked to spread the word that many more maritime engineering and ship scientists are needed!