One of our summer placement student’s Aaron Page reports on his summer with FSI as part of the Maritime Robotics Lab. This was a paid internship the University of Southampton’s EXCEL scheme we will be advertising similar opportunities for next summer in the spring.

As a recently graduated electromechanical engineer from the University of Southampton, having the opportunity to spend two months at the highly regarded Bolderwood innovation campus with the FSI (Fluid Interactions Group) department was a fantastic opportunity to apply my studies to a real word engineering application. During my time I was working on a new control architecture for the Motors and Rudders on a previously student designed and built vessel called Fortitude this alongside further refitting will lead to long term deployments in the transatlantic and other areas for data gathering missions.
The project allowed me to apply my knowledge of control theory, whilst allowing me to further develop my skills as a programmer. I was given complete freedom to peruse the objective allowing me to approach it in the way I believed would yield the best results, this alongside regular weekly meetings with my supervisors ensured all options, and potential issues were highlighted and investigated. Various control methods were considered and how they could later be integrated with different autonomous control approaches and object avoidance algorithm’s, ensuring future steps in this multi-layered project are as smooth as possible. Being involved so early in this project has also given me the opportunity to identify problems that may be encountered later on in the projects life as well as make suggestions that may alter the direction of hardware selection.
Being invited to the weekly FSI seminar meetings where PhD students gave presentations on their research, furthered my knowledge of a field I had very little exposure to previously. This, alongside the summer events run by the staff and PhD students, has made my time with them very enjoyable.
This internship, run in partnership with the EXCEL scheme, has helped me developed a range of skills that I will now be applying as I start my PhD at the University of Southampton within ECS. I hope to remain involved with the project and look forward to seeing how it develops over the next couple of years.

On the second week of September, the first Fluids UK Conference took place at the Imperial College in London. Several researchers across the UK and overseas gathered together to share their investigations in a very wide range of disciplines across fluid dynamics. A large number of researchers from the Aerodynamics and Flight Mechanics (AFM) and the Fluid-Structure Interactions (FSI) groups of the University of Southampton were also present in the event.

I am Bernat Font Garcia a first year PhD student and I recently attended my first conference as a speaker. I was part of a big group coming from the University of Southampton, one of the universities which brought more researchers into the event.
A total of 96 presentations were delivered during the three days of the conference. Presenters were either PhD students or post-docs, mostly. Each presenter had 10 minutes to explain the topic and 2 minutes were scheduled for questions. It was a challenging exercise to condense one year of work into such a short amount of time, although I can image this was even more difficult for students in the last year of the doctorate or post-docs researchers!
The topic of my presentation was: “A two-dimensional model for three-dimensional symmetric flows”. Using the well-known backward-facing step test case, the aim is to obtain the steady solution of the three-dimensional case at the symmetry plane using a two-dimensional model. Hence, instead of carrying a three-dimensional simulation, the solution is achieved by the two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations plus additional terms. The main outcome of this work is the notable reduction of the computational time required to achieve the three-dimensional solution for symmetric or spatially-periodic flows.

Overall, it was very inspiring to get to know what topics are currently being investigated in fluid dynamics and to meet people working within this field. Also, it was the perfect opportunity to communicate my work and conclude the first year of my doctorate.

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.

Recently, the Maritime Robotics Laboratory of the Fluid Structure Interactions Group hosted visitors from the Council for Science and Technology, Cabinet Office Analysis and Insight Team and from the Government Office for Science. They were given an overview of the development of maritime autonomous and robotic systems, developments in sensor technologies, and future directions of research in the field. The visit was supported by Dr Jon Downes, Dr Nick Townsend, Dr Blair Thornton and Prof Ajit Shenoi.

The MRL’s fleet of vehicles was on display as well as the excellent facilities within the Lab within easy access of B185 for trialling performance in the new towing tank.
 

MIT student Fiona Grant spent her summer internship in FSI working with Drs Nick Townsend and Gabe Weymouth working on the Maritime Robotics Lab vehicle Fleur. She uses wave energy to self propel herself into or with the waves.  Fiona’s report below details some of her activities.  We enjoyed her company and that of our five other interns and are grateful to our funding partners for their support and in particular the University’s EXCEL scheme.

This summer I worked on a project studying the behavior of flapping foil systems. Flapping foils are devices modeled on the swimming mechanism for cetaceans and many fish. These devices have been widely researched, and it has been shown through experiments and simulation that flapping foils can be used to both harvest energy and produce thrust. The relationship between the magnitude and phase of the foil heave and pitch motions defines these two modes. Flapping foils have been successfully implemented in several full scale applications, including ships and wave energy converters (WECs). Currently, the optimal control and stability of flapping foil systems is being investigated, and more research is needed to solve this problem.
The system for this project was a model vessel with a pair of flapping foils attached at the stern. The goal for the summer was to gain an understanding of the dynamic behavior of the system and design a velocity controller for the vessel. I began by modeling the dynamics of the vessel and a single foil in calm water. I then worked on setting up the hardware, LabVIEW code, and driver software to control the linear motor that actuates the foil. In the final two weeks, we were able to run tests in the towing tank and collect data on the open loop response of the vessel and foil system for a range of frequencies and amplitudes.
This internship was a great experience. I was able to put my knowledge of control theory and experimentation techniques into practice and affirmed my desire to study control systems in graduate school. Throughout the internship I was able to work with computer simulation, hardware and software integration, and model testing. During my project I had guidance from my supervisors, but also a level of independence that allowed me to explore the topic and make my own choices about the research. I now feel more prepared for graduate school and excited about continuing my studies.
 

Our next University open day is rapidly approaching on the 3rd and 4th of September. We will be providing a range of activities associated with our ship science degree programmes including displays around our recent 4th year group design projects as seen in the Faculty design show and weather permitting displayed on the lawn in front of B176 including our very own foiling research catamaran.

Register Here

Staff and students will be on hand in a drop in room to discuss the many opportunities that a Ship science degree programme offers and our flexible choice of themes in naval architecture, yacht and small craft, offshore engineering amongst a number.

Recent and not so recent graduates are welcome to catch up and to see our exciting new Boldrewood Innovation Campus including visits and demonstrations of our 138 m long, 6 m wide and 3.5 m deep hydroscience towing and wave tank. Please explore some of our recent activities reported in this blog.
Our admissions team will give a number of presentations through the day and can answer detailed questions.
All are welcome and we would particularly encourage those who maybe are not aware of the exciting opportunities in the maritime engineering sector. If you have potential interests in mechanical engineering or aerospace then please visit the Boldrewood campus and find out some more!

International Sports Engineering Conference in Delft
The 11^th ISEA conference: “The Engineering of Sport 11’” took place in Delft, Netherlands between the 11th and 14th of July 2016. The conference, widely recognised as the leading sports engineering conference, was attended by many representatives of well-known companies such as Adidas and Sunnto as well as academics from word class universities. Four PhD students from Southampton Performance Sports Engineering Laboratory (within FSI) together with Dr Chris Phillips, Prof Dominic Hudson and Prof Stephen Turnock attended the conference.

The conference started with a tour of TU Delft Sports Engineering Institute and Delft University of Technology laboratories, after which all delegates enjoyed themselves over welcome drinks on the main square of Delft town.

During the conference, as many as 165 papers were presented. The variety of topics and speakers in three parallel sessions at all times, ensured that everyone found a talk related to their area of work. In between the presentation, visitors could enjoy interesting exhibitions from various sports companies and poster sessions.

University of Southampton’s PSE Lab presented four papers on a broad variety of research with topics ranging from swimming technique monitoring techniques presented by Scott Michaels, who used cap-mounted tri-axial accelerometer to measure the distance, lap times and stroke rates in swim training to kayak race prediction algorithm by Adam Higgens. In his paper, Adam presented the output of his BEng project on the simulator for sprint kayak racing allowing the prediction of race times based on the physiological capabilities and mass of a given athlete. On the winter sports side, Chen Gong presented his work on the analysis of performance indices for simulated skeleton descent. As part of his PhD, Chen is developing a three degree-of-freedom simulation to analyse the influence of different control strategies on the descent time of a bob-skeleton. The paper outlined the effect of control variables in the search of optimal controller design. Prof Turnock presented a paper on Human- Fluid –Structure Interaction for the International Moth, in which both the the impact of foil deflections and dynamic sailor motions were analysed to better understand their influence on the performance of a foiling dinghy. The papers are all available on-line as part of Procedia.

The conference provided a great opportunity for networking with both well-known academics as well as other PhD students from other universities. All delegates took part in a fun sports evening where they could choose from playing tennis, football or ultimate frisbee and meet their teammates over an informal setting. There was also a chance to try your strength at a special Survival Run held at the university sports complex!
The English and penalties