This year the 6th International Conference on Marine Engineering was held in Rome. The conference spanned three days with three parallel sessions, aiming to bring together scientists working on computational methods for maritime engineering. Presentations came from various backgrounds, including naval architecture, offshore engineering, coastal engineering, renewable energy, underwater structural engineering and fish farming. Most attendees were from a computational fluid dynamics background, though with a great variety of methodologies. Whilst viscous-flow finite volume codes were the most represented, there were interesting results from smooth particle hydrodynamics and Lattice-Boltzman methods. There were several plenary lectures which focused on fluid-structure interactions and complex viscous modelling of bubbly flows and breaking waves.
Across all fields and methodologies there were some similar themes. Accurate viscous modelling, adaptive mesh technologies and hardware-software interaction were key topics throughout. In naval architecture, much of the discussion was focused on accurate manoeuvring simulations in waves, design & optimization and the use of advanced turbulence modelling.
The University of Southampton had two attendees: Ameen Bassam presented on “Ship Voyage Energy Efficiency Assessment Using Ship Simulators” and James Hawkes presented on “Chaotic Linear Equation-System Solvers for Unsteady CFD”.
The next MARINE conference will be held in Nantes, France, in 2017. Full papers from this year can be downloaded from:
http://congress.cimne.com/marine2015