As part of our ongoing development of the Boldrewood towing tank we’ve spent a week carrying out the International Towing Tank Conference‘s recommended Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) benchmark case. PIV technique allows the velocity field to be measured across a two -dimensional plane created by a laser sheet. The tank is seeded with small reflective particles and two photos are taken a short time interval apart. Image processing allows the velocity field within a high resolution underwater camera’s image frame to be measured.
Flat plate at angle of attack to flow – matt black finish reduces unwanted reflections from laser sheet
In these tests a rig was built to allow a flat plate to be towed at an angle of attack creating a strong tip vortex. The PIV measurements allow the location and strength of the vortex to be obtained experimentally. The tank test has to be run in the dark with the use of special protective goggles when observing the tests.
Just the carriage lights on prior to a test
The tests for the calibration are carried out at low speed of 0.4 m/s with even the carriage light switch off and just the faint glow of the data acquisition computer screens
Video of a test at 0.4 m/s showing team on the carriage and then the laser sheet pulses and can see the seeded particles
Thanks to the team lead by Magnus with support from Melike, James and David. Funding the LaVision PIV system came through the EPSRC funded National Wind Tunnel Facility
If you are thinking about a future in mechanical engineering or aerospace why not consider maritime? Salaries remain strong, there is a worldwide shortage of engineers with maritime expertise and you as an individual can really make a significant difference.
Looking to the future the UK maritime sector is set to continue growing and to become an ever more important part of the UK’s economy. Already the maritime sector with an economic impact of £116bn is larger than the rail and aviation sectors combined. As an industry it supports over a million jobs that are 45% more productive than UK average, with pay 30% higher than UK benchmark and has expanded by 35% between 2010 and 2019.
These are the highlights from a detailed report by CEBR commissioned by MaritimeUK that discusses crucial maritime activities in the UK: shipping(£49Bn), engineering and science(£34Bn), business services(£13.7Bn), ports(£10Bn) and leisure(£8Bn) all play their part.
Research and development will play a key part in future UK success particularly in green technology developments around: decarbonising the shipping fleet of the world; developing the technology to harvest marine renewables such as floating offshore wind, tidal and wave energy; digital technology to ensure that ships are productive and can operate safely minimising risk to crew through increased use of autonomous systems; data analytics that allow ships to manage their voyage to account for the latest weather; achieving improved performance through use of foiling technology developed through high performance sailing events such as the America’s Cup, reducing ship resistance using air lubrication technology and returning to the age of sail through wind assist.
What industry needs are the highly qualified maritime engineers and ship scientists that can create and implement these innovative technologies. Typically 15 times as many students apply for aerospace as opposed to maritime courses and as a result only a small proportion of aerospace graduates actually go to work in their sector whereas in maritime there are many many opportunities worldwide as well as in the UK.
Our degree programmes are designed for the future and are taught by academics who are at the forefront of the maritime sector worldwide. As part of the School of Engineering we are in the top four of UK Engineering units of assessment for the the quality of its research (REF2021) and its societal and economic impact. The pathways for our final two years of our MEng programme include advanced computational engineering, ocean energy and offshore engineering, international naval architecture, marine engineering and autonomy, and yacht and high performance craft.
Our courses are the only ones that are joint accredited by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Royal Institution of Naval Architects and the Institute of Marine Engineers, Scientists and Technologists. Year-on-year our national student survey results consistently rate us as the top UK maritime engineering and ship science degree programme.
Will future ships use clean green Hydrogen as their power source? Maritime Research and Innovation UK (MarRIUK) has proposed a major modal transport shift as part of the UK Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review. The vision is to have within 10 years a fleet of UK built coastal zero carbon ships transporting goods and cargoes around the UK’s large network of ports. Shifting transport from already congested road and rail onto water which is already the lowest energy method of goods transport.
The proposal was developed by a core team of MarRIUK working group members from BMT, Shell Shipping and ourselves at the University of Southampton. It looks to transform how the UK makes the most of its coastal highways. Examining the transport logistics system as whole will allow many of our smaller ports to be transformed, sustaining their localities, will reduce the growing pressures on our road and rail bottlenecks, will revolutionise the approach to vessel traffic management and greatly ease the development of maritime autonomous systems development. However, front and centre is the need to decarbonise shipping. The development of a flagship fleet of zero carbon ships will allow us to take the bold step needed to replace fossil fuels with an energy source that has pollutant free emissions will blaze a trail to the industry woldwide showing how it can be done.
Research and Innovation will be at the heart of the work bringing together the maritime and other sectors to develop a cost effective transport system. MarRIUk is part of Maritime UK which next week (12th-18th Oct 2020) has a series of events as part of Maritime Week 2020. An opportunity to showcase the many aspects of the maritime sector in the UK which is such a strong part of our economy.
Bubble screen helping capture behaviour of fluid during flykick
It is an interesting question in performance swimming, especially in longer events, is for how long and with what intensity an underwater fly kick can be used? A more intense, mainly lower leg intense kick may well allow a faster speed but is it worth the energy cost compared to a more whole body wave motion ?
Image from dynamic motion capture showing key point locations and corresponding element positions
This work carried out by the performance sport engineering laboratory used a combination of kinematic measurements of a world class swimmer, an applied fluid dynamics code using Lighthill’s method and a state-of-the-art muscoskeletal analysis code to use the measured motion, coupled with estimates of fluid loading to evaluate the likely muscle activity required and hence energy cost of two approaches to underwater fly kick. Optimisation methods were used to generalise the approach from a specific swimmer to a more general result.
Anybody image of same poistion taht allows estimates of muscle group engagement
So how should swimmers trade-off their techniques during a race? Watching the best, especially as they proceed through heats to final clearly shows that they understand that the trade-off is there to be made. But what is clear to all is that having a great underwater fly kick techniques that allows a swimmer to access both methods is a powerful tool to deploy in competition.
In honour of this year’s theme for World Maritime Day 2019 on 26th September, we are delighted to announce our networking event Empowering Women in the Maritime Community. We will be holding a Q&A/networking session for women in the maritime sector, who will be sharing what they do, how they got there, and any advice they might have. The session will be relatively informal, with lots of opportunities to ask questions and garner advice. More details to follow next month: RAENg Visiting Professor Dr Penny Jeffcoate
The evnt is being coordinated by Dr Penny Jeffcoate our RAEng Visiting Professor – Marine Energy Technologies and Associated Infrastructure.
Penny joined us in 2018 as part of the Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor scheme, alongside her current role at tidal energy developer Sustainable Marine Energy as their R&D Manager. This industry-into-academia initiative aims to utilise the experience of Visiting Professors to enhance student learning as well as the employability and skills of UK engineering graduates, whilst strengthening external partnerships with industry. Under the objectives of this scheme, industry practitioners participate in course development, face-to-face teaching and mentoring of engineering undergraduates at the host university for three years.
Penny worked with Maritime Engineering and Ship Science programmes in 2018-2019 to help develop the Renewable Energy (SESS6067) and Group Design Projects courses for final year students, to give them practice in industry methods, particularly in reporting and critical reasoning. She will be working with the department this year to expand this interaction and give students insight into designing to client specification and management practices. This develop will continue until the end of her placement in 2021 and will hopefully be used for many years of student intake to come. The RAEng scheme also promotes the encouragement of traditionally minority entities in engineering, such as women and BAME. Penny will therefore be organising an event in support of this year’s IMO World Maritime Day: Empowering Women in the Maritime Community.
A 3D image reconstruction generated using BioCam showing an 8 metre long whale carcass that is sandwiched between two large coral mounds.
A team from the University of Southampton has successfully obtained the largest continuous visual map of the seafloor ever obtained in UK waters during a currently ongoing expedition to the Darwin Mounds. The expedition led by co-chief scientists Blair Thornton of the University of Southampton and Veerle Huvenne of the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), deployed underwater robots to map cold-water-coral mounds at a depth of 1000m in a Marine Protected Area (MPA).
BioCam fitted on the underside of the underwater robot Autosub 6000 as it is recovered from the ocean after a successful mission
The autonomous robot, Autosub6000 of the NOC, was equipped with BioCam, a newly developed deep-sea 3D imaging system developed by the University of Southampton under the Natural Environment Research Council’s OCEANIDS Marine Sensor Capital program. During its first 24-hour deployment, BioCam was able to visually map the seafloor at 40 times the rate of conventional imaging systems, covering approximately 50 times the area of Wembley stadium’s football pitch. The example below shows one of the 650,000 images taken during the dive, showing diverse species of deep-sea life sheltering amongst the corals. BioCam also discovered a whale carcass more than 8 metres in length on the seafloor just a few hundred metres from a coral mound. An image of the seafloor taken at 1000m depth showing diverse species of animals living amongst coral
Blair Thornton, Associate Professor of Marine Autonomy at the University of Southampton says, “The large area and high level of detail in the visual maps BioCam collects can help scientists recognise patterns and features on the seafloor that would otherwise go unnoticed, allowing ecologists to compare sites and document changes over time at much larger scales than previously possible.”
He continues, “It is fantastic that the system delivered results from the word go. This was only possible because of a huge team effort, with staff and students at the University of Southampton, local industries, and the MARS team at the NOC working hard together to develop BioCam and integrate it onto the Autosub 6000. Huge credit also goes to the ship’s crew for safely deploying and recovering the system in less than ideal sea states.”
Veerle Huvenne, Team Leader for Seafloor and Habitat Mapping at the National Oceanography Centre explains “typically, scientists map out large scale spatial patterns in ecology by inferring relationships between sonar maps and short transects of visual imagery (photographs or video). BioCam’s ability to continuously image areas in 3D over tens to hundreds of hectares gives us the ability to directly observe patterns over entire habitats. This is a powerful new tool for scientists to better understand these fragile environments”.
Hayley Hinchen, Marine Habitats Monitoring Manager at the Joint Nature Conservation Committee says, “The data BioCam collects could support marine conservation by providing vital evidence at a large scale about how effective measures like marine protected areas are at conserving our environment, especially in fragile, complex habitats that can’t be physically sampled. The evidence gathered could help us understand how damaged areas of the seafloor recover with time in protected sites like the Darwin Mounds”
More information about BioCam can be found at the following website, https://ocean.soton.ac.uk/biocam
Regular updates about the current expedition are posted on www.projects.noc.ac.uk/class/blog
Link to BBC article – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-49753440
The “Future Marine Engineering” is an exciting residential course, developed to inspire Year 9 students aged 13 to 14 about marine engineering and career opportunities in the maritime sector. The course was organised by the Smallpeice Trust with technical content delivered our own inspiring team of post-doctoral researchers, Dr Jeanne Blanchard, Mr Przemyslaw Grudniewski and Dr Yikun Wang, in the Fluid Structure Interactions group at the University of Southampton. Wave Energy Trials in the pool
This year, 95 students took part in the 3.5 days course with the aim to design and build a wave energy-harvesting device and a remote control boat to simulate a maintenance vessel for their renewable energy farms. The objective was to provide a prototype design to generate as much power from the wave energy-harvesting device as possible and to develop a maintenance vessel that could quickly and reliably service the energy farms in an emergency. The students were given a limited quantity of materials to design, build and test their products with their unlimited imaginations. In addition, they were to perform a “Dragon’s Den” style pitch and to defend their designs against rigorous technical ‘interrogations’ from some marine experts. Design underway
To help the students develop their understanding of the marine industry they were given different talks by academics and an industrial expert from Shell Shipping and Maritime. This culminated in a celebration of their achievements at a formal dinner and an opportunity for the students to present their projects to academics and Seafarers UK, who kindly sponsored the course. On the last day, the students have tested their devices and model boats in the swimming pool with great success, before attending the awards ceremony with prizes given by Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute and the Royal Institution of Naval Architects with the chance for the students to join the Institution as junior members.
Ship Science has regularly hosted visits by Arkwright engineering scholars. These students apply for these prestigiuous shcolarships at 16 and are intended to help prepare them to be the next generation of leaders in the engineering profession. We were delighted to see tihs year that one of the visitors wrote some kind words about their visit. http://www.arkwright.org.uk/main/latest-news/post/50-scholars-explore-maritime-engineering
2019 Scjholars inspecting our 138 m long wave and towing tank
Our courses at Southampton in Maritime Engineeirng and ship Science are designed to prepare students to play a leading role in the engineeirng profession associated with the maritime sector. Our degree programmes, both MEng and MSc, uniquely offer direct routes to professional membership and Chartered Engineeirng status with three such professional associations; Institution of Mechanical Engineers Royal Institution of Naval Architects Institute of Marine Engineers, Scientists and Technologists
Hydrogen Fuelled High Speed Marine Transport – EngD Thesis Ivo Veldhuis
Looking to the future of how shipping can reduce its emissions of greenhouses gases and local pollutants such as NOx and SOx Professor Stephen Turnock spoke at an industry event recently organised by SC Group and chaired by Steve Austen. Other talks addressed the regulatory challenge of reducing emissions and in delivering diesel engines that are IMO Tier III compliant. https://proteum.co.uk/videos/
The challenge for today’s ship designers are significant as the future direction of how ships will be powered is not clear. Work at Southampton has considered how best to apply Nuclear technology, possible methods of using hybrid power storage solutions in bulk carriers, and recently on the methods of energy management for hydrogen fuel cells powered vessels. Container ship moored at Southampton Port – would cold ironing significantly improve air quality in Southampton
What is clear is that to tackle the problem will allow significant and rapid innovation. will we end in a world where electric motor are the prime units of motive power or will conventional engine technology but with new fuels such as LNG in the short term or Hydrogen in the long term. While the global emissions is an ever present challenge it is often the local air quality health related issues especially in port cities that appears to be driving the need for rapid change.
A recent undergraduate project used AIS data for month to evaluate over a month who much emissions of NOx, SOx and particulates were emitted due to all the ship movements within Southampton water. The AIS data allows the time and location as well as the likely amount of emissions to be estimated.
