Roberto Ravenna (IEEE OES SBC Vice president), Marvin Wright (IEEE OES SBC Webmaster), Olena Karpenko (IEEE OES SBC Chair), Andrea Coraddu (IEEE OES SBC Advisor)
Introduction of event
Above all, Covid19 is pushing researchers to harness the power of the internet and online communication tools. Building on the renewed confidence in organising online events, the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society (OES) Student Branch Chapter (SBC) of the Naval Architecture, Ocean and Marine Engineering (NAOME) Department of the University of Strathclyde, hosted an online project presentation competition dedicated to outstanding final year students of the academic year. The IEEE OES Strathclyde SBC, founded in 2018 under the group of enthusiastic and dedicated PhD students and academic staff of NAOME department, is a thriving group of young and senior marine researchers with currently around 20 active members. Next to providing a community space for young researchers and students, it supports and organises various events across campus. The society is having great success in organising the workshops, giving an opportunity for students to learn and enlarge their knowledge on state-of-the-art topics. Despite the many activities held during the year and challenges all the world is facing, the OES organises the annual poster competition to provide a place for students to showcase their final year bachelor work and practice presentation skills while receiving feedback from professionals on their hard work at the end of the degree.
Figure 1 Panel members
Forced by the COVID 19 pandemic, the format of the event was an online competition and presentation. Everyone adapted well to the situation and made full use of the online video conference. The virtual event organised at the end of the academic year proved to be popular with people joining from across the University. Out of 50 students, the senior members of society, led by SBC Advisor, Dr Andrea Coraddu, selected three participants based on their outstanding performance in the current year’s graduate poster presentation at the NAOME department at the University of Strathclyde. Each of the selected students had to present their work within 15 minutes with additional 10 minutes time for Q&A. For this year’s event Prof John Watson from the University of Aberdeen, the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society (OES) Vice President for OCEANS conferences, kindly joined as a judge. He was joined in the jury by Dr James Irvine (IEEE SBC Councillor), Dr Andrea Coraddu (IEEE OES SBC Advisor) and Olena Karpenko (IEEE OES SBC Chair) from the University of Strathclyde.
It ran for half a day without any interruptions and has left organisers, judging panel and students with a happy feeling.
IEEE-OES is engaged in all aspects of science, engineering, and technology that address research, development, and operations pertaining to all bodies of water. This is fully reflected in the participating poster topics. The three presentations led to interesting discussions during each Q&A time. All students have shown outstanding efforts in their work and have impressed with the produced results in the given time. The panel had the difficult task to choose the winner and have decided for Yi Huang, who has shown particular detail in his results and presentation. He has since managed to publish his work at a conference (ISOPE-I-20-1207).
While the OES SBC Strathclyde hopes to hold this event in person again, the virtual event has shown that it can be completed successfully online. We would like to congratulate the three students on their excellent final year projects and graduating since the event. In the following you can find the abstracts of the three finalists:
Yi Huang (Supervisors: Dr Lai-Bing Jia, University of Strathclyde)
Topic: Plastic Debris in Waves an Experimental Study
Plastic waste in the ocean is one of the most consequential issues of humankind. Despite the horrifying situation, little knowledge has people acquired about the effect of local wave on plastic particle movement. In this study, the issue of local wave effect has been studied to investigate the trajectories and distribution of the plastic particles on the free water surface. A series of model tests have been performed using the old water tank in Henry Dyer building for the regular wave tests. Factors including a single and a flock plastic, different frequencies are considered, and for irregular wave tests, five different sea states are designed to be tested in the new water tank in the Kelvin Hydrodynamic Lab (KHL). The presented experimental results showed a correlation between the wave frequency and the final position of the plastic particles. Specifically speaking, under the circumstance of fixed altitude and regular wave, when the frequency is higher than 1.2Hz, the majority of the particles will end up on shore, and a higher frequency will lead to a faster landing. Similar phenomenon was observed in the irregular wave test, where the possibility of landing at lower sea states are higher than that at higher sea states. Results and observations gained from this project can contribute to our understanding of the marine pollution issue and help predicting the landing time of waste in coastal area as well as creating a more accurate estimation of the distribution of ocean plastic in seabed.
Catalina-Georgiana Francu (Supervisors: Dr Maurizio Collu, University of Strathclyde)
Topic: Impact of the Non-Linear Viscous Drag Damping on the Optimisation of Floating Support Structures for Offshore Wind Turbines in the Frequency-Domain
The floating offshore wind industry has consistently evolved during the past years. The society is now more aware of the damaging effects of climate change on the environment, so renewable and less polluting energy sources have become a common topic even in the political space.
The existing structures for offshore floating wind turbines were shaped by the oil and gas industry, so it is high time other options were explored. This report is a contribution to a larger project that aims to do just that. By carefully considering the difference between the two fields, the FEDORA Multidisciplinary Analysis and Optimisation Framework was developed by the supervisors and other researchers in order to discover unique configurations that would ideally have a reduced structural mass, leading to substantial cost savings. This code investigates only the hydrodynamic potential flow problem, but it may not describe the behaviour of the platform accurately in all sea states. Consequently, the non-linear viscous effects had to be included. A viscous damping matrix was created by linearising the drag damping term in Morison’s Equation following the method that was introduced by Borgman. The water particles velocities induced by the wave were neglected. Thus, the linearised damping coefficients (surge-surge, surge-pitch/pitch-surge, pitch-pitch) were calculated as functions of the standard deviation of the body velocity. Simulations were conducted for two load cases, one of which was chosen to be more energetic. It was concluded that the addition of the drag damping leads to a 1% reduction in the structural mass in the harsher environmental condition and to a reduction of only 0.03% in the less severe one. However, the surge and pitch motions of the structure are always greatly impacted. In the more severe environmental conditions, the surge RAO at the natural frequency (0.05 rad/sec) was reduced by 71.1% when the viscous effects were considered. The pitch RAO at 0.13 rad/sec was reduced by 79.5% leading to a shift in the pitch natural frequency. The absolute values of the surge-surge, pitch-pitch, surge-pitch/pitch-surge elements from the viscous damping matrix were found to be 125%, 118% and 121% greater in the first load case than in the second one. Therefore, the drag damping has a substantial influence on the motions of the platform in some extreme sea states.
Vaszilisz Mitropulosz (Supervisors: Dr Andrea Coraddu)
Topic: Response Amplitude Operator Prediction of unconventionally parametrised SPAR type Floating Offshore Wind Turbines
The floating offshore wind sector expected to expand in the coming years, but the technology applied in their substructure shapes are not matured yet. In recent years different platform configurations were designed. In most case, the configurations follow a conventional parametrisation which was inherited from the Oil and Gas industry. Therefore, their optimisation already inherited an ample bias and parametric constraints, which means that there is a significant margin for improvements in the FOWT system performance and cost, which can be done through substructure optimisation. An optimisation process may need hundreds of thousands of iterations to find the optimum point successfully. For this purpose, an unconventional parametrisation was created, where the cylindrical shape of SPAR type Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) substructure was replaced by five truncated cones placed on each other. However, during the construction of the optimisation algorithm, the prediction of the Response Amplitude Operators (RAO) of the floating system seemed to be computationally too expensive to perform the task effectively. An efficient way to minimise the computational overload, is to replace the costly simulation model with a cheaper-to-run metamodel. Therefore, this project deals with a potential metamodel generation, which can predict the RAOs of unconventionally parametrised SPAR type floating wind turbine.
Suleman Mazhar has been working as a professor in Information & Communication Engineering at Harbin Engineering University (China) since July 2019. He did PhD from Tokyo University (Japan) and postdoctorate from Georgetown University (Washington DC, USA). He had BS-CS from FAST-NUCES (Lahore) and MS from GIK Institute (Pakistan). He is TYSP young scientist fellow (Ministry of Science & Technology China) and have won several research grants from international organizations such as DAAD (Germany), ICIMOD (Nepal), NRPU (Higher Education Commission Pakistan), WWF (Worldwide Fund for Nature) Pakistan. His research focus is deep learning and signal processing applications for environmental monitoring, with particular focus on underwater acoustics, and marine mammal conservation. He is a reviewer for professional journals such as Journal of Acoustical Society (America), IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, IEEE Sensors Journal, Applied Acoustics, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
Peng Ren is a full professor with the College of Oceanography and Space Informatics, China University of Petroleum (East China). He is the director of Qingdao International Research Center for Intelligent Forecast and Detection of Oceanic Catastrophes. He received the K. M. Scott Prize from the University of York, the Natural Science award (first rank) from China Institute of Electronics, and the Eduardo Caianiello Best Student Paper Award from 18th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing as one co-author. He has served as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.
Mohd Rizal Arshad is a full professor at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Malaysia, where he specializes in ocean robotics technology and intelligent system. He received his B.Eng. in Medical Electronics & Instrumentation and PhD in Electronic Engineering from University of Liverpool, UK in 1994 and 1999, respectively. He completed his MSc. in Electronic Control Engineering from the University of Salford, UK in Dec 1995. He has supervised many postgraduate students and published extensively in local and international publications. He is a senior member of the IEEE, and was awarded IEEE OES Presidential Award in 2019.
Itzik Klein is an Assistant Professor, heading the Autonomous Navigation and Sensor Fusion Lab, at the Charney School of Marine Sciences, Hatter Department of Marine Technologies, University of Haifa. He is an IEEE Senior Member and a member of the IEEE Journal of Indoor and Seamless Positioning and Navigation (J-ISPIN) Editorial Board. Prior to joining the University of Haifa, he worked at leading companies in Israel on navigation topics for more than 15 years. He has a wide range of experience in navigation systems and sensor fusion from both industry and academic perspectives. His research interests lie in the intersection of artificial intelligence with inertial sensing, sensor fusion, and autonomous underwater vehicles.
John R. Potter (IEEE M’94, SM’02, F’18) graduated in the previous century with a joint honours Mathematics and Physics Degree from Bristol and a PhD. in Glaciology and Oceanography from Cambridge, UK studying Antarctic ice mass balance, where he spent four consecutive summers. This work helped underscore the non-linear fragility of polar ice to climate change and led to him receiving the Polar Medal from Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.
Nick is a Visiting Fellow at the UK National Oceanographic Center, Southampton His nomination was endorsed by the Underwater Acoustics Technology Committee. He had worked as a Research Associate and Lecturer at University of Birmingham and has been working as a Research Scientist at the Applied Research Laboratory, University of Texas, Austin. He has also served as a Program Officer at the Office of Naval Research Global. He is a senior member of IEEE (OES) and a Fellow of Acoustical Society of America (ASA). Nick has also been serving as Assoc. Editor for IEEE JoE and JASA. He is widely acknowledged for his expertise are seabed acoustics, parametric array modeling, sonar beamformer, underwater signal processing.
Maurizio Migliaccio (M’91-SM’00-F’17) is Full professor of Electromagnetics at Università di Napoli Parthenope (Italy) and was Affiliated Full Professor at NOVA Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, FL (USA). He has been teaching Microwave Remote Sensing since 1994. He was visiting scientist at Deutsche Forschungsanstalt fur Lüft und Raumfahrt (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. He was member of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) scientific committee. He was member of the ASI CosmoSkyMed second generation panel. He was e-geos AdCom member. He was Italian delegate of the ESA PB-EO board. He was Member of South Africa Expert Review Panel for Space Exploration. He serves as reviewer for the UE, Italian Research Ministry (MIUR), NCST, Kazakhstan and Hong Kong Research board. He lectured in USA, Canada, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Germany, Spain, Czech Republic, Switzerland and Italy. He was Italian delegate at UE COST SMOS Mode Action. He is listed in the Italian Top Scientists. He is an IEEE Trans. Geoscience and Remote Sensing AE, International Journal of Remote Sensing AE, and was IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering AE Special Issue on Radar for Marine and Maritime Remote Sensing, IEEE JSTARS AE of the Special Issue on CosmoSKyMed, Member of the Indian Journal of Radio & Space Physics Editorial board. His main current scientific interests cover SAR sea oil slick and man-made target monitoring, remote sensing for marine and coastal applications, remote sensing for agriculture monitoring, polarimetry, inverse problems for resolution enhancement, reverberating chambers. He published about 160 peer-reviewed journal papers on remote sensing and applied electromagnetics.
He has developed various types of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and related application technologies including navigation methods, a new sensing method using a chemical sensor, precise seafloor mapping methods, a precise seabed positioning system with a resolution of a few centimeters, a new sensing system of the thickness of cobalt-rich crust; and more. He has shown, by using these technologies that AUVs are practicable and valuable tools for deep-sea exploration.
Donna Kocak has had an outstanding career in defense and scientific projects developing and applying solutions in subsea optics, imaging and robotics. She graduated with an M.Sc in Computer Science in 1997 from the University of Central Florida; an MBA in 2008 from the University of Florida; and M.Sc in Industrial Engineering in 2011 from the University of Central Florida. She is currently a Senior Scientist, Advanced Concepts Engineering, and Fellow at the Harris Corporation in Melbourne, Florida, where she has developed novel optical imaging and communication solutions for under-sea defense and scientific projects. Prior to 2008 Donna Kocak was Founder and President of Green Sky Imaging, LLC (GSI) who developed laser/video photogrammetry software for underwater inspection and survey. Her earlier career positions were with Naval Training Systems Center, Florida; Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, Florida; eMerge Interactive; and the Advanced Technologies Group in Florida.
John Potter has a Joint Honours degree in Mathematics and Physics from Bristol University in the UK and a PhD in Glaciology and Oceanography from the University of Cambridge on research in the Antarctic, for which he was awarded the Polar Medal in 1988. John has worked on polar oceanography, underwater acoustics, ambient noise (including imaging), marine mammals, communications, IoUT, autonomous vehicles and strategic development. He has 40 years’ international experience working at the British Antarctic Survey in the UK, NATO in Italy, SIO in California, NUS in Singapore and most recently at NTNU in Norway. John is a Fellow of the IEEE and MTS, an Associate Editor for the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, IEEE OES Distinguished Lecturer, PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer & an International Fellow of the Explorer’s Club.
Dr. James V. Candy is the Chief Scientist for Engineering and former Director of the Center for Advanced Signal & Image Sciences at the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Candy received a commission in the USAF in 1967 and was a Systems Engineer/Test Director from 1967 to 1971. He has been a Researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 1976 holding various positions including that of Project Engineer for Signal Processing and Thrust Area Leader for Signal and Control Engineering. Educationally, he received his B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Cincinnati and his M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is a registered Control System Engineer in the state of California. He has been an Adjunct Professor at San Francisco State University, University of Santa Clara, and UC Berkeley, Extension teaching graduate courses in signal and image processing. He is an Adjunct Full-Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Candy is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and elected as a Life Member (Fellow) at the University of Cambridge (Clare Hall College). He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Phi Kappa Phi honorary societies. He was elected as a Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Candy received the IEEE Distinguished Technical Achievement Award for the “development of model-based signal processing in ocean acoustics.” Dr. Candy was selected as a IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for oceanic signal processing as well as presenting an IEEE tutorial on advanced signal processing available through their video website courses. He was nominated for the prestigious Edward Teller Fellowship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Candy was awarded the Interdisciplinary Helmholtz-Rayleigh Silver Medal in Signal Processing/Underwater Acoustics by the Acoustical Society of America for his technical contributions. He has published over 225 journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports as well as written three texts in signal processing, “Signal Processing: the Model-Based Approach,” (McGraw-Hill, 1986), “Signal Processing: the Modern Approach,” (McGraw-Hill, 1988), “Model-Based Signal Processing,” (Wiley/IEEE Press, 2006) and “Bayesian Signal Processing: Classical, Modern and Particle Filtering” (Wiley/IEEE Press, 2009). He was the General Chairman of the inaugural 2006 IEEE Nonlinear Statistical Signal Processing Workshop held at the Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. He has presented a variety of short courses and tutorials sponsored by the IEEE and ASA in Applied Signal Processing, Spectral Estimation, Advanced Digital Signal Processing, Applied Model-Based Signal Processing, Applied Acoustical Signal Processing, Model-Based Ocean Acoustic Signal Processing and Bayesian Signal Processing for IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society/ASA. He has also presented short courses in Applied Model-Based Signal Processing for the SPIE Optical Society. He is currently the IEEE Chair of the Technical Committee on “Sonar Signal and Image Processing” and was the Chair of the ASA Technical Committee on “Signal Processing in Acoustics” as well as being an Associate Editor for Signal Processing of ASA (on-line JASAXL). He was recently nominated for the Vice Presidency of the ASA and elected as a member of the Administrative Committee of IEEE OES. His research interests include Bayesian estimation, identification, spatial estimation, signal and image processing, array signal processing, nonlinear signal processing, tomography, sonar/radar processing and biomedical applications.
Kenneth Foote is a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The George Washington University in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Brown University in 1973. He was an engineer at Raytheon Company, 1968-1974; postdoctoral scholar at Loughborough University of Technology, 1974-1975; research fellow and substitute lecturer at the University of Bergen, 1975-1981. He began working at the Institute of Marine Research, Bergen, in 1979; joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1999. His general area of expertise is in underwater sound scattering, with applications to the quantification of fish, other aquatic organisms, and physical scatterers in the water column and on the seafloor. In developing and transitioning acoustic methods and instruments to operations at sea, he has worked from 77°N to 55°S.
René Garello, professor at Télécom Bretagne, Fellow IEEE, co-leader of the TOMS (Traitements, Observations et Méthodes Statistiques) research team, in Pôle CID of the UMR CNRS 3192 Lab-STICC.
Professor Mal Heron is Adjunct Professor in the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, and is CEO of Portmap Remote Ocean Sensing Pty Ltd. His PhD work in Auckland, New Zealand, was on radio-wave probing of the ionosphere, and that is reflected in his early ionospheric papers. He changed research fields to the scattering of HF radio waves from the ocean surface during the 1980s. Through the 1990s his research has broadened into oceanographic phenomena which can be studied by remote sensing, including HF radar and salinity mapping from airborne microwave radiometers . Throughout, there have been one-off papers where he has been involved in solving a problem in a cognate area like medical physics, and paleobiogeography. Occasionally, he has diverted into side-tracks like a burst of papers on the effect of bushfires on radio communications. His present project of the Australian Coastal Ocean Radar Network (ACORN) is about the development of new processing methods and applications of HF radar data to address oceanography problems. He is currently promoting the use of high resolution VHF ocean radars, based on the PortMap high resolution radar.
Hanu Singh graduated B.S. ECE and Computer Science (1989) from George Mason University and Ph.D. (1995) from MIT/Woods Hole.He led the development and commercialization of the Seabed AUV, nine of which are in operation at other universities and government laboratories around the world. He was technical lead for development and operations for Polar AUVs (Jaguar and Puma) and towed vehicles(Camper and Seasled), and the development and commercialization of the Jetyak ASVs, 18 of which are currently in use. He was involved in the development of UAS for polar and oceanographic applications, and high resolution multi-sensor acoustic and optical mapping with underwater vehicles on over 55 oceanographic cruises in support of physical oceanography, marine archaeology, biology, fisheries, coral reef studies, geology and geophysics and sea-ice studies. He is an accomplished Research Student advisor and has made strong collaborations across the US (including at MIT, SIO, Stanford, Columbia LDEO) and internationally including in the UK, Australia, Canada, Korea, Taiwan, China, Japan, India, Sweden and Norway. Hanu Singh is currently Chair of the IEEE Ocean Engineering Technology Committee on Autonomous Marine Systems with responsibilities that include organizing the biennial IEEE AUV Conference, 2008 onwards. Associate Editor, IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, 2007-2011. Associate editor, Journal of Field Robotics 2012 onwards.
Milica Stojanovic graduated from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 1988, and received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Northeastern University in Boston, in 1991 and 1993. She was a Principal Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 2008 joined Northeastern University, where she is currently a Professor of electrical and computer engineering. She is also a Guest Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Milica’s research interests include digital communications theory, statistical signal processing and wireless networks, and their applications to underwater acoustic systems. She has made pioneering contributions to underwater acoustic communications, and her work has been widely cited. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, and serves as an Associate Editor for its Journal of Oceanic Engineering (and in the past for Transactions on Signal Processing and Transactions on Vehicular Technology). She also serves on the Advisory Board of the IEEE Communication Letters, and chairs the IEEE Ocean Engineering Society’s Technical Committee for Underwater Communication, Navigation and Positioning. Milica is the recipient of the 2015 IEEE/OES Distinguished Technical Achievement Award.
Dr. Paul C. Hines was born and raised in Glace Bay, Cape Breton. From 1977-1981 he attended Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, graduating with a B.Sc. (Hon) in Engineering-Physics.