Tag Archives: #maritime engineering

Making Waves: the Future of Shipping

As we look to the future where the world’s population is rising and the per capita wealth of the planet is similarly rising. To do this we have to focus on how we look after our world’s seas and oceans.

Maritime Engineers and Ship Scientists are trained to understand the engineering challenges of designing ships, floating platforms and the many other types of vehicles and systems that are operated in those oceans. The UK Chamber of Shipping have generated some great content to explore some of these challenges. Follow this link to learn more and watch their video

Looking forward we need to ensure that the development and operation of any system in the ocean is as sustainable as possible. We need to preserve, protect and often clean up the seas. This requires the traditional education of the Naval Architect and Marine Engineer to evolve. At Southampton we are continually looking at the structure and content of our programmes. Our introduction of a set of pathways reflects that. These build on the foundation of engineering science in year 1, the essentials of naval architecture and marine engineering in year 2 and then in-depth pathways focus in years 3 and 4. Our modules that make up these programmes reflect the wider environment and societal aspects of engineering as well as the managerial , manufacturing and operational aspects of maritime engineering design

MEng Pathways for our triple accredited degree programme( IMechE, RINA, IMarEST)

  • Advanced Computational Engineering
  • International Naval Architecture includes a semester abroad
  • Marine Engineering and Autonomy
  • Naval Architecture
  • Ocean Energy and Offshore Engineering
  • Yacht adn High Performance Craft

Our pathways reflect the challenges we face and equip our graduates with the skills to play their part in the national and global maritime sector . All can be taken with an industrial placement year at the end of the 2nd or 3rd year. Over the next few posts we will be introducing each of these programmes and linking to our staff’s active research interests that support our teaching.

If you want to find out more our Admissions Tutor will be doing a live presentation that you can sign up for or why not visit us in person on Saturday 9th October. You can chat to us, our students and visit our world class facilities on the Boldrewood Innovation Campus that we share with one of the world’s leading ship classification societies, Lloyd’s Register

Great British SHIPS

If you have a little more free time over the holiday period then one way to relax might be to watch the second series produced by windfall films for channel 5 on Great British Ships. Our own Professor Dominic Hudson takes part in the episode on RMS Queen Mary. A fascinating episode, especially with respect to Queen Mary’s role as a fast troop carrier in WWII.

One aspect related to its encounter with a rogue wave and its resultant large angle of roll. An effect very nicely illustrated using the wave maker system in our Boldrewood towing tank. The programme presenter took to a kayak to demonstrate how vessels can safely pass through large waves head on but are more challenged when side on. If you watch carefully (at about 30 or so minutes in) although the kayak does indeed capsize in the extreme wave there might have been a little bit of paddle assist…

This is not the first time our towing tank has been used for TV programmes, see for example the BBC documentary commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Jutland. The biggest impact so far is Dr Sally Bennett’s video of a large amplitude regular wave which so far has reached 2.9M views on YouTube.

Maritime MASTERS rogue wave encounter with a floating offshore wind turbine

We were delighted to see one of our MSc Maritime Engineering Science student John Hayes present his impressive project on the response of a moored floating offshore wind turbine at the final of this year Maritime Masters competition.

He used our 138 m long Boldrewood wave/towing tank with 1:91 scale model of a spar buoy style floating wind turbine platform to investigate the level of motions that would be expected if it encountered a Rogue wave. This was just one of an impressive set of MSc projects finished this summer by our MSc class of 18/19

rogue wave encounters a floating wind turbine at model scale

In the video the rogue wave encounters a floating offshore wind turbine platform in the Boldrewood towing tank at the university of Southampton. A set of waves of appropriate amplitude and phase are generated from our 12 paddle wave maker so they coalesce as a short sequence of extreme amplitude waves at a precise location in the tank. In this case one of our MSc in Maritime Engineering Science had built a 1:91 scale model of a spar buoy style floating platform to measure the motion response with a realistic mooring arrangement. Motions were captured above and below the water using our 12 camera Qualisys system including the mooring line response.